How do you make a heatmap? This came from kerimcan in the FlowingData forums, and krees followed up with a couple of good links on how to do them in R. It really is super easy. Here's how to make a heatmap, with just a few lines of code, like this.
Category: Featured
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How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution
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Graphical World Progress Report – Now Available
Want the report? Details at the end on how to get a print. (Update: All proceeds go to UNICEF towards relief effort in Haiti.
UNdata provides a catalog of 27 United Nations statistical databases and 60 million records about the past, present, and future state of the world. Topics include demographics, life expectancy, labor levels, poverty, and a lot more. What does all that data mean though? World Progress Report, the latest from FlowingPrints, offers a look into the expansive UN collection.
In whole, the report tells a story of how we live and die, and the stuff in between.
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11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide
Deal with data? No doubt you've come across the time-based variety. The visualization you use to explore and display that data changes depending on what you're after and data types. Maybe you're looking for increases and decreases, or maybe seasonal patterns.
This is a guide to help you figure out what type of visualization to use to see that stuff.
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5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009
It was a huge year for data. There's no denying it. Data is about to explode.
Applications sprung up left and right that help you understand your data - your Web traffic, your finances, and your life. There are now online marketplaces that sell data as files or via API. Data.gov launched to provide the public with usable, machine-readable data on a national scale. State and local governments followed, and data availability expands every day.
At the same time, there are now tons of tools that you can use to visualize your data. It's not just Excel anymore, and a lot of it is browser-based. Some of the tools even have aesthetics to boot.
It's exciting times for data, indeed.
Data has been declared sexy, and the rise of the data scientist is here.
With all the new projects this year, it was hard to filter down to the best, but here they are: two honorable mentions and the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Visualizations were chosen based on analysis, aesthetics, and most importantly, how well they told their story (or how well they let you tell yours).
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How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare
You've seen the NameExplorer from the Baby Name Wizard by Martin Wattenberg. It's an interactive area chart that lets you explore the popularity of names over time. Search by clicking on names or typing in a name in the prompt. It's simple. It's sexy. Everybody loves it.
This is a step-by-step guide on how to make a similar visualization in Actionscript/Flash with your own data and how to customize the design for whatever you need. We're after last week's graphic on consumer spending:
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9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide
With all the visualization options out there, it can be hard to figure out what graph or chart suits your data best. This is a guide to make your decision easier for one particular type of data: proportions.
Maybe you want to show poll results or the types of crime over time, or maybe you're interested in a single percentage. Here's how you can show it.
We all know about the pie chart. The circle represents the whole, and the size of wedge represents a percentage of that whole. Together, those represented values, add up to 100 percent. Use this only if you're comparing a few values (like three or less) or if you're like me, use it for a ton of categories to annoy the BI people every now and then. Continue Reading
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How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools
There are about a million ways to make a choropleth map. You know, the maps that color regions by some metric. The problem is that a lot of solutions require expensive software or have a high learning curve...or both. What if you just want a simple map without all the GIS stuff? In this post, I'll show you how to make a county-specific choropleth map using only free tools.
The Result
Here's what we're after. It's the most recent unemployment map from last week.
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Unemployment, 2004 to Present – The Country is Bleeding
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the most recent unemployment numbers last week. Things aren't looking good for the unemployed, I'm afraid.
I showed my younger sister the maps. Her response: "It looks like the country is bleeding."
While the recession is "over" the unemployment rate rose to 9.8% in September from 9.7% in August. That's 214,000 more people who are jobless in the United States. The last time unemployment was this high was back in June 1983 when it was 10.1%.
Check out the more detailed view here:
From 2004 to 2007, unemployment was actually decreasing, but things went sour in 2008, and we've been trying to bounce back ever since.
Update: See the step-by-step tutorial on how you can make a map like this with your data.
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30 Resources to Find the Data You Need
Let's say you have this idea for a visualization or application, or you're just curious about some trend. But you have a problem. You can't find the data, and without the data, you can't even start. This is a guide and a list of sources for where you can find that data you're looking for. There's a lot out there.
Universities
Being a graduate student, I always look to the library for books and resources. Many libraries are amping up their technology and have some expansive data archives. Many statistics departments also tend to keep a list of data somewhere. Continue Reading
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Chart Junk vs. Eye Candy: What’s the Difference?
There's this one phrase that really bothers me when it comes to data graphics. No doubt you've heard it or read it, and maybe it even popped into your head once or twice.
The phrase I'm talking about is: "Edward Tufte is crying."
People like to say this when they see a graphic that doesn't fit the ET law of high data/ink ratio. Then after the commenter has declared that ET is in fact a very emotional man, the graphic is classified "chart junk."
First off, I'm pretty sure ET isn't that melodramatic. He doesn't cry over a bad graph nor does he die a little inside or roll over in his grave if he were dead. I don't think an angel get its wings every time he rings a bell either. Although I could be wrong about the latter.
Second, not everything that fails to fit the mold of a traditional graph, visualization, or whatever you want to call it, is chart junk. One person's chart junk is another person's eye candy. What you see just depends on what angle you're looking at it from.
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What Visualization Tool/Software Should You Use? – Getting Started
Are you looking to get into data visualization, but don't quite know where to begin? With all of the available tools to help you visualize data, it can be confusing where to start. The good news is, well, that there are a lot of (free) available tools out there to help you get started. It's just a matter of deciding which one suits you best. This is a guide to help you figure that out.
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your.flowingdata Gets an Upgrade + Free iPhone App
It's been fun to see your.flowingdata evolve the past few weeks, and it's good to see so many of you making use of it. Thanks for all the useful feedback too.For those already using YFD, you'll be pleased to know there are a few new features. If you haven't had the chance, you can start collecting data with YFD in just a few steps.
Tag Your Data
First, you can now tag your data using Twitter's hashtag convention. For example let's say you're logging television shows and movies that you watch. Without tags, you'd have to separate the two with different keywords, but now you can tag your data with #movie or #tv. You're welcome to use multiple tags too.Snippets
Second, there are short snippets at the top of each individual action page that tell you a little something about your data:
It's basic now, but this is a step towards more advanced statistics.
iPhone App and Mozilla Ubiquity
These updates are not my doing in the least bit, but they're probably the coolest. @josecastillo developed a basic iPhone app for YFD that makes it easier and faster to tweet data.
I don't have an iPhone, so I haven't been able to try it out nor can I attest to how well it works, but I'd love to hear any comments (and I'm sure @josecastillo would too) from anyone who's using the app.
Oh, and by the way, it's free. Get the your.flowingdata app here.
Next up is for the Mozilla Ubiquity early adopters. @andygeers published a YFD command for Ubiquity. This gives you a quick command to enter your.flowingdata tweets from Firefox. You'll have to have Ubiquity installed before you can use it.
And finally, @creativeapps wrote a quick line of javascript for a YFD bookmarklet in your browser. Click the bookmark, enter your tweet, and you're set.
Thanks, all for making YFD cooler :). I'm looking forward to whatever else is in store.
What You Think
As usual, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do let me know in the your.flowingdata forum. Your input helps me make your.flowingdata better.
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Collect Data About Yourself with Twitter – your.flowingdata is Live
your.flowingdata (YFD), a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself, is now LIVE!
I feel like I've been working on this project forever, but it's finally at a place where I think it's ready for human consumption. And unlike the previous version, what you track is completely up to you.
How to Get Started
You can start collecting data about yourself in just a few easy steps:
- First off, follow @yfd on Twitter.
- Second, sign in to your.flowingdata with Twitter.
- Once you're logged in to YFD, you'll see a link to a quick start guide. Follow the step-by-step directions and you'll be tweeting data in no time.
Once you've started tweeting data, it'll take about two minutes (usually less) for your data to appear on YFD. Continue Reading
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20 Visualizations to Understand Crime
There's a lot of crime data. For almost every reported crime, there's a paper or digital record of it somewhere, which means hundreds of thousands of data points - number of thefts, break-ins, assaults, and homicides as well as where and when the incidents occurred. With all this data it's no surprise that the NYPD (and more recently, the LAPD) took a liking to COMPSTAT, an accountability management system driven by data.
While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people's privacy, there's still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data. Continue Reading
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Rise of the Data Scientist
As we've all read by now, Google's chief economist Hal Varian commented in January that the next sexy job in the next 10 years would be statisticians. Obviously, I whole-heartedly agree. Heck, I'd go a step further and say they're sexy now - mentally and physically.
However, if you went on to read the rest of Varian's interview, you'd know that by statisticians, he actually meant it as a general title for someone who is able to extract information from large datasets and then present something of use to non-data experts.
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