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In many ways, data wants to be social. It wants to get out there for people to see, interact with other datasets, and it wants people to talk about it. There aren't that many places for that to happen though. Newly launched BuzzData wants to fill that void. It's pitched as a "social network designed for data."
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A couple of weeks ago, Visually, a new infographics-based startup, launched with a warm reception among all the popular tech blogs. I didn't post about it right away for a couple of reasons. The first is that I've been sick for the past couple of weeks, and it's been hard to think in between all the nose-blowing. Seriously, this cold will not die. Secondly, I wasn't sure how I felt about the new site (partially due to the first reason). Now that I've let my thoughts simmer, it's clear that Visually has potential, but it's way too early to tell if it will actually work.
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It's easy to share static graphics. Save an image and then upload it to your own site. Boom, you're done. However, when it comes to interactive graphics, which come in a variety of file formats, it's not as straightforward. The Visualizing Player helps with this:
We love and respect what you create and we know how much effort goes into each piece (it's why everything that gets uploaded to Visualizing is protected under a CC license). One of our core missions here at Visualizing is to build you the best possible platform and the most powerful tools for sharing those creations.
Now when you go to Visualizing, there's an embed code accompanied with each graphic, and it's easy to share any visualization on your own blog or site. The embed works for 7 formats: HTML5, Java, Flash, PDF, Video, Image, and URL.
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Whenever I post a Sankey diagram (for example, here, here, and here), someone always asks how they can make their own. I'm always surprised that so many people have data where the chart type applies, but in any case, I've never had a good answer other than open up Illustrator and do it by hand. DensityDesign tries to make Sankey diagram creation easier with Fineo.
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Last year Stamen Design received a grant from the Knight News Challenge to design and implement Citytracking, a project to help people gather data about their cities and gain some kind of understanding about it. Dotspotting, the phase of the project, just launched. It makes it much easier to put dots on a map.
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Men and women are different. You know that. But do they tweet differently? Tweetolife is a simple application that lets you compare and contrast what men and women tweet about. Simply type in a search term or phrase and compare. For example, search for love, and 63 percent of tweets that contain that word were from women, based on the sample data collected between November 2009 and February 2010.
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GeoCommons, an open repository of data and maps, launched version 2.0 this week, which is more feature-rich and robust than the first. Two of the major updates have to do with the fast-changing data landscape: amount of data and browser technology.
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Formatting data is a necessary pain, so anything that makes formatting easier is always welcome. Data Wrangler, from the Stanford Visualization Group, is the latest in the growing set of tools to get your data the way you need it (so that you can get to the fun part already). It's similar to Google Refine in that they're both browser-based, but my first impression is that Data Wrangler is more lightweight and it feels more responsive.
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A while back, Google showed how Influenza outbreaks correlated to searches for flu-related terms with Google Flu Trends. It helped researchers and policy-makers estimate flu activity much sooner than with previous methods. Google Correlate is the evolution of Flu Trends in that now you can correlate search trends with not just flu cases, but with your own data or other search queries.
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You know Matthew Ericson's simple weather mashup? It shows only what you need to know for the day. WeatherSpark is the the opposite of that.
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With Google's recent data-related offerings, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that they've opened up their Public Data Explorer so that you can upload your own data. Previously, it was only available when you searched for something like "GDP" and a related dataset was supplied by an official provider.
[W]e’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.
In terms of visualization, there's isn't anything new. You've got your maps, bar charts, and time series line charts, with the checkboxes on the left (like the snapshot below). Then there's the chart types available via the charting API.
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Add another online destination to find the data that you need. DataMarket launched back in May with Icelandic data, but just a few days ago relaunched with data of the international variety. They tout 100 million time series datasets and 600 million facts. I'm not totally sure what that means (100 million lines, sets of lines?), but I take it that means a lot.
Just over 2 years and countless cups of coffee after we started coding, DataMarket.com launches with international data. You can now find, visualize and download data from many of the world’s most important data providers on our site.
At first glance DataMarket feels a lot like now defunct Swivel. Search for the data you want and you get back a list of datasets. The focus on only time series though is actually a plus in that they can provide more specific tools to visualize and explore. The current toolset isn't going to blow you away, but it's not bad.
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This Tract, by Michal Migurski of Stamen, with some help from Craig Mod, lets you view details of your block by way of Census data. It's still using 2000 data but was built in anticipation of the 2010 release, which should come in a couple of months. So we'll probably see some improvements from now until then.
Enter your location or browse the slippy map for information on race, income, gender, education, age, and housing. There are also aggregates for your Census tract, county, state, and country.
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Language changes. Culture changes. And we can see some of these changes via what authors write about in books over the years. Google's Book Ngram Viewer lets you search through this data, and shows a graph similar similar to the output of Google Trends. The above is the trends for nursery school, kindergarten, and child care:
This shows trends in three ngrams from 1950 to 2000: "nursery school" (a 2-gram or bigram), "kindergarten" (a 1-gram or unigram), and "child care" (another bigram). What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are "nursery school" or "child care"? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are "kindergarten"? Here, you can see that use of the phrase "child care" started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking "nursery school" around 1970 and then "kindergarten" around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.
Find anything interesting?
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Programming can be tough in the beginning, which can make advanced visualization beyond the Excel spreadsheet hard to come by. Bestiario tries to make it easier with their most recent creation Impure:
Impure is a visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more.
It's not a plug-and-play application, but it's not scripting in a text editor either. Think of it as somewhere in between that (hence the visual programming language). They've taken the logic behind code, and encapsulated them into modules or structures, and you can piece them together like a puzzle. The interface kind of reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.
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Inspired by Shan Carter's simple data converter, appropriately named Mr. Data Converter, Matthew Ericson just put Mr. People online. The tool lets you paste a list of names, and it will parse the first and last name, suffix, title, and other parts for you. You can even have multiple names in a single row.
Years ago, while trying to clean up the names of donors in campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, I hacked together a Perl module — loosely based on the Lingua-EN-NameParse module — to standardize names. One port to Ruby later, I've finally put together a Web front end for it.
Getting data in the right format, whether for analysis or visualization, can be a huge pain. Imagine. All the data you need is right in front of you, but you can't do anything with it yet, because as often is the case, it's not in a nice and pretty rectangular format. So anything that makes this easier and quicker is an instant bookmark for me.
[Mr. People via @mericson]
The personal finance site Mint aggregates spending data from four million users. At the individual level, Mint is useful in that it brings all of your finances into one place. Zoom out and aggregate, and you have spending for a city or a state. This is what Mint Data does.
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Booking flights became so much easier when it all shifted online, but it hasn't changed in years. You put in your preferred dates and times and you get a long list of options. Oftentimes those listings can be a pain as you browse through all of your options. Oh the burden of choice. Hipmunk tries to make flight search easier with a visual interface.
As usual, you enter your origin and destination but instead of plain HTML tables, you get something like the above, and you can sort the options from least to greatest amount of agony. Rectangle lengths represent flight times and are color-coded by airline. Flights with the same take off and arrival times, but priced higher are hidden to help you narrow down quicker.
Hipmunk is still in the early stages, but a quick search shows a lot of promise.
In collaboration with NBC News and The Gates Foundation, Ben Fry-headed Fathom Design shows you how K-12 schools measure up in your area. If you're a parent or soon-to-be parent considering a move, this will be especially interesting to you. The Education Nation Scorecard lets you search for your location or a specific school to see how they perform and how they compare to the rest of the country.
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Your email says a lot about who you are, who you interact with, and what you're up to at any given time. Maybe it's receipts from that online travel site or notifications from Facebook. There are lots of tidbits you can extract from your inbox. But how? PhD candidate Bill Zeller provides you with Graph Your Inbox.
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FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better — mainly through data visualization. More...
Where are the biggest box office movies (not) streaming?
High-resolution maps of science
Find out what percent you are in
Backbone of the flavor network
Cinemetrics creates a visual fingerprint for movies
Vehicles involved in fatal crashes
World subway paths at scale
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