Software

• Venn pie-agrams

  May 23, 2012 to Software  •  Kim Rees  •  Share on Twitter

  

  So I got to thinking, since I'm on this pie chart kick, "what would be the worst pie chart ever?" And I decided it would be a Venn diagram made with pie charts. I laughed to myself, imagining such a creation. Then I thought, somebody's probably done this. And indeed, there's an app for that.

  At long last, the power of Venn diagrams and pie charts combine to turn the world of mathematics on its head! If you've ever felt the need to create Venn diagrams with pie charts, or wished your pie charts could overlap to provide even more informative data, then Venn Pie-agrams is the app for you!

  I'll leave it at that.

• Automated infographics with easel.ly

  May 13, 2012 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  I'm pretty sure I'm not in their target audience, but my main takeaway from this video is that now, with easel.ly, you don't need time, money, or skill to make quality infographics. And the prezi-like video seems fitting.

  Maybe I'm just stuck in my ways, but I'm having trouble getting on board with these tools. Easel.ly, for example, provides themes, such as the one on the right. There's a guy in the middle with graphs around him and pointers coming out of his body. You get to edit however you want.

  So in this case, you start with a complete visual and then work your way backwards to the data, which I'm not sure how you can edit other than manually changing the size of the graphs. (Working with the interface takes some patience at this stage in the application's life.) It's rare that good graphics are produced when you go this direction.

  Instead, start with the data (or information) first and then build around that — don't try to fit the data (or information) into a space it wasn't meant for.

  Or maybe there's a lot more in store that we can't see yet. Either way, right now, the application is rough at best.

• Miso: An open source toolkit for data visualisation

  April 23, 2012 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Your online visualization options are limited when you don't know how to program. The Miso Project, a collaboration between The Guardian and Bocoup, is an effort to lighten the barrier to entry.

  While the goal is to build a toolkit that makes visualization easier and faster, the first release of the project is Dataset, a JavaScript library to setup the foundation of any good data graphic. If you've ever worked with data on the Web, you know there are a variety of (usually painful) steps you have to go through before you actually get to fun stuff. Dataset will help you with the data transformation and and management grunt work.

  One of the most common patterns we've found while building JavaScript-based interactive content is the need to handle a variety of data sources such as JSON files, CSVs, remote APIs and Google Spreadsheets. Dataset simplifies this part of the process by providing a set of powerful tools to import those sources and work with the data. Once data is in a Dataset, it becomes simple to select, group, and calculate properties of, the data. Additionally, Dataset makes it easy to work with real-time and changing data, which pose one of the more complex challenges to data visualization work.

  Gonna keep an eye on this one. I'm curious to see how the visualization component starts to build out.

• Timelines that are Easy to Make and Use

  March 29, 2012 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  As a project of the Knight News Innovation Lab, Timeline by Verite is an open source project that lets you make and share interactive timelines. It's simple and customizable. Plug in your own data as JSON, or use the Google Docs template for an even faster route, and you're good to embed. It's also easy to grab source material from sites like Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr. Score.

• Kartograph aims to make interactive vector maps easier

  March 7, 2012 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Gregor Aisch wanted a better way to make maps online that allowed something other than the Mercator projection, so he developed his own. The result is Kartograph, a lightweight framework "for building interactive map applications without Google Maps or any other mapping service. It was created with the needs of designers and data journalists in mind." No more tiles.

  The framework is still in its infancy, with not much documentation, but the map-making process seems to be straightforward. It's basically a two-step process. First you generate an SVG map with Kartograph's Python component, and then you load the SVG with the JavaScript component, which is built on top of Raphael.

  Check out the showcase for a sense of what it can do. You've got your choropleth, chart symbols, and 3-dimensional projections. The star however is clearly the map of Italy, complete with a cute little ferry that follows a geo path.

  [Kartograph]

• Live coding and inventing on principle

  February 20, 2012 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  This talk by Bret Victor caught fire a few days ago, but I just got a chance to watch to it in its entirety. It's worth the one hour. Victor demos some great looking software that connects code to the visual, making the creation process more visceral, and he finishes up with worhtwhile thoughts on the invention process.

• WolframAlpha Pro launches in an effort to democratize data science

  February 16, 2012 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Taking the next step in the Wolfram|Alpha experiment, Wolfram launches a Pro version that lets you plug in your own data and get information out of it.

  The key idea is automation. The concept in Wolfram|Alpha Pro is that I should just be able to take my data in whatever raw form it arrives, and throw it into Wolfram|Alpha Pro. And then Wolfram|Alpha Pro should automatically do a whole bunch of analysis, and then give me a well-organized report about my data. And if my data isn't too large, this should all happen in a few seconds.

  I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but the sense I get from others is that the part about data not being too large is key. Apparently it's still in the early stages and can't handle much data at once. The main hook is automated summaries, model fitting, and some graphs, but if you know enough to interpret the models appropriately, shouldn't you know enough to derive them?

  I'd love to hear initial thoughts from those who have tried it. For those who haven't, it's $4.99 per month, but there's a two-week free trail.

  [Wolfram]

• Weave for visualization development

  February 7, 2012 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment, or Weave for short, is open source software intended for flexible visualization.

  Weave (BETA 1.0) is a new web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of user proficiency — novice to advanced — as well as the ability to integrate, disseminate and visualize data at "nested" levels of geography.

  It looks like everything is done through a click interface, and you can piece together modules and link them, etc. There is some setup involved, but there are a number of video tutorials and documents to get everything installed.

  Source code also available on GitHub.

  [Weave]

• Angry Birds productivity tracker

  January 3, 2012 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  With the new year, many of you (myself included) and your employers resolved to be more productive this year. You are going to finish that side project. Learn that new language. Run that long distance. You are going to be all that you can be. Then you spent all day in front of the television yesterday while playing Angry Birds. Little did you know, productivity and Angry Birds go hand-in-hand.

  Enter Productivity Birds, created and used internally by Stamen.

  We’ve used these graphs as the simplest-possible visualization of how we spend our time so we know how we’re doing relative to the budget for a project. Operationally, the data output of these graphs feeds directly into an accrued revenue model that lets us predict our income earlier. The day/week granularity makes it possible to collect the data as a team without making everyone unhappy with management overhead, and the bias toward whole- or half-day increments helps stabilize fractured schedules (not for me, though—my time is probably the most shattered of anyone in the studio).

  Calendar time is represented on the horizontal axis and time spent on a project is the vertical. The object of the game is to hit the bird, where a bird over the pig means a risk of losing money, and a bird past the big means a risk of finishing late. The stacked area chart on the bottom shows who has been or is working on the project.

  The small app, built with Protovis, is available on GitHub.

  [tecznotes]

• Quick time series visualization with Cube

  September 21, 2011 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Seeing how things change over time can be important for a business so that you can figure out what works best. Square, the company that turns your iPhone into a credit card reader, just released Cube, an open-source system to help you visualize time series data. It's built on MongoDB, Node, and D3.
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• Explore large image collections with ImagePlot

  September 18, 2011 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  When we make charts and graphs, we usually think of the data abstractions in terms of bars, dots, and other geometric shapes. ImagePlot, from UCSD-based Software Studies, instead makes it easier to use images to understand large collections.
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• BuzzData aims to make data more social

  August 23, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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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• On the Launch of Visually

  August 4, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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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• Visualizing Player makes it easier to share visualization

  July 19, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  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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• Make Sankey flow diagrams with Fineo, sort of

  July 6, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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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• Dotspotting to make city data more legible

  June 27, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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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• Inbox Influence shows political contributions by the people in your email

  June 21, 2011 to Software  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  While browser plugins like Rapportive tell you the social networks that people in your email belong to, Inbox Influence, from the Sunlight Foundation, uses their data from Influence Explorer, Transparency Data, and Party Time to show a different type of network in your inbox.
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• Gender and time comparisons on Twitter

  June 9, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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 2.0, now with more mapping features

  June 6, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  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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• DataWrangler for your data formatting needs

  May 26, 2011 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  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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