Ricochet by Chrys Wu » Data + Graphics http://www.chryswu.com/blog Where Ideas For Online News Bounce Around Fri, 30 Sep 2011 22:02:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How The Guardian does data visualization http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/09/28/how-the-guardian-does-data-visualization/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/09/28/how-the-guardian-does-data-visualization/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:05:58 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1596 Last week, Alastair Dant, lead interactive technologist at The Guardian, came to Hacks/Hackers NYC to show how his team produces its informative and award-winning interactive graphics.

It’s a wide-ranging talk about what’s new and inspiring about news technology, and how each team member’s unique skills contribute to the whole.

Well worth watching. And if you want to deeply nerd out with The Guardian, check out their Developer Blog.

The projects mentioned in Alastair’s talk:

Alastair’s team is Martin Shuttleworth, Mariana Santos, Jonathan Richards and Alex Graul.

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/09/28/how-the-guardian-does-data-visualization/feed/ 0 How to make an interactive heat map with Google Fusion tables http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-make-an-interactive-heat-map-with-google-fusion-tables/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-make-an-interactive-heat-map-with-google-fusion-tables/#comments Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:22:45 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1527 I’ve started writing a few how-tos for Poynter.org. The first piece is a step-by-step illustrated tutorial on how to make an interactive heat map with Google Fusion Tables, like the one below.

If you’d like to see other tutorials, let me know what you’re looking for.

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-make-an-interactive-heat-map-with-google-fusion-tables/feed/ 0 Data Visualization Tools, Slides and Links from NICAR11 http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/02/24/data-visualization-tools-slides-links-nicar11/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/02/24/data-visualization-tools-slides-links-nicar11/#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:48:00 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1327 CAR 2011 was stuffed full of information, so much so that the only way to keep up with everything has been to keep a log of what people have been sharing.

Feb. 28 update: Thanks to everyone who’s forwarded additional links and presentations (I’m marking them with NEW as they’re added) and to all who’ve sent me nice notes about this list.

Philip Smith forwarded a JSON file of NICAR tweets with links in them. Want it? Download it.

This year’s conference looks to have been a tremendous success, bringing in the most registered attendees in nearly a decade. Congratulations to NICAR for a terrific, educational and inspiring event.

A more narrative look at what happened at the conference can be found on the conference blog. But if you’re anxious to dive in, this is your buffet: Prepare to have your mind blown.

Got links from sessions you attended? Post them in comments or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva and I’ll add them to this list.

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
 

Presentations & Tutorials

• NEW Using TwitInfo and TweeQL to find and tell stories (from Adam Marcus)

• NEW A Gentle Introduction to SQL using SQLite: slides, full tutorial and steps only (from Troy Thibodeaux)

• Valet Parking Your Django App (from Jeremy Bowers)

• Similarity algorithms using Python (from Luke Rosiak)

• The Quick and Dirty Varnish Setup for Django (from Andy Boyle)

Making HTML Tables Interactive (from Michelle Minkoff)

• QuantumGIS 1 tutorial and files (16.3MB) (from Timothy Barmann)
• Use JavaScript and jQuery to create interactive maps: tutorial and files (17.5 MB) (from Timothy Barmann)
• How to break news online – and use LA Times app engine tools (from Ben Welsh)

• NodeXL for Social Network Analysis (from Peter Aldhous)

• Excel, CAR and mapping training tipsheets, slides and datasets (from Jennifer LaFleur)

• My Favorite (Excel) Things (from MaryJo Webster)

• Latest in Mapping tools and examples

• (Ruby) Coding for Absolute Beginners (from Dan Nguyen) – following the tutorial will produce “My Very First Web Page”

• Google Refine tutorial and datasets (that download to your hard drive on click) (from David Huynh)

• APIs: Making the Web a Data Medium (from Anthony DeBarros and Derek Willis)

• NEW R for Statistics: First Steps (from Peter Aldhous)

• NEW R for Statistics: Automate Your Analysis (from Jacob Fenton)

• Hands-on R, a step-by-step tutorial (from Jacob Fenton)

• Ruby4Kids — mentioned in passing as a low-friction way to learn the basics of Ruby

• How to make an intensity map with custom boundaries using Google Fusion Tables

• Google Fusion Tables tutorial

• Cracking Open Electric Records slides and case law < = link launches a PDF bundle (from DB Smallman)

• Internet Reporting: What You Should Know (from Jack Gillum)

• Free software: From Spreadsheets to GIS, Part 1 and Part 2 (from Jacob Fenton and Anthony DeBarros)

• Beyond Mapping: Spatial Analysis on the Cheap (from Long Creative)

Beautiful Data (from Aron Pilhofer)
View more presentations from pilhofer

• Intro to Python, Session 1 tutorial and Python tipsheet (from Jacqueline Kazil and Serdar Tumgoren)

• Getting into a data-oriented mindset (from Mary Jo Webster and Wendell Cochran)

• Dataviz for beginners (from Matt Stiles and Sanjay Bhatt)

• MGRS Explained (from Jacob Harris)

Almost Scraping: Web Scraping without Programming presentation and tipsheet (from Michelle Minkoff and Matt Wynn)

• Data Visualization with JavaScript and HTML5 (from Jeff Larson)

• Tutorial: Census Data with Tableau Public

• PostGIS is Your New Bicycle – be wowed by a free alternative to costly desktop GIS (from Mike Corey and Ben Welsh)


 

Software & Tools

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples

• 3Scale – API management and monetization tool (free trial)
• API Playground – try APIs, no coding skills necessary
• Backbone.js adds a models-collections-views structure to JavaScript applications
• BatchGeo interactive map maker
• Biznar.com – business search engine
• CanIUse.com browser compatibility tables
• Census Block Conversions API
• ChangeTracker from ProPublica – track changes to any website
• ChinaVitae – learn who’s who in power in China
• CollegeInsight – compare universities by cost, financial aid, diversity, job placement rate
• DataWrangler cleans and transforms data
• Download manager downTHEMall is a FireFox extension that grabs webpage links and images.
• Europe Media Monitor’s NewsBrief – an international alternative to Google News
• EUROCONTROL – “find blocked private planes that might have flown to Europe, for example: see which executives are going to Cannes”
• FCC Census Block Conversions API – boundary service API, excellent for mapping
• The FireShot FireFox extension creates browser screenshots, adds annotation and more.
• Foreign Labor Certification Data Center – find what visas a company has applied for (there may be wage information tied to the application)
• Get Lat Lon – finds latitude and longitude for any location worldwide
• Free Google Drawings wireframe templates
• Google Fusion Tables for data analysis and visualization
• Google Refine for data cleaning
• Inmarsat Ships Directory – lookup a ship’s phone number
• JSFiddle online JavaScript editor
• Jigsaw: “Visual analytics for exploring and understanding document collections”
• Little Sis – visualizing the networks of social, financial and political power
• MarineTraffic.com – track vessels in real time
• Mayan open source, Django-based document manager
• Mr. Data Converter converts Excel data into web-friendly formats
• Needlebase
• NETROnline – public records search, especially good for real property lookups
• NodeXL uses Excel for network analysis
• NodeXL Teaching lessons and tutorials
• Numberway.com – lookup phone numbers around the world
• Outwit Hub – FireFox plugin for scraping websites
• PDFonFly – converts web pages to PDFs
• PhraseNet diagrams relationships between words in text
• PostGIS – adds mapping ability to PostgreSQL
• PrivacyChoice – rates website privacy policies
• Protovis
• PySAL an open source Python library for spatial analysis functions
• R statistical analysis software
R libraries recommended by Amanda Cox, Jeff Larson and others: ggplot, RColorBrewer (color picker), rgdal (bindings for GDAL – the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library), survival (survival analysis)
• Recorded Future – temporal analysis search engine uses predictive analytics to discover the likelihood of events in the future
• RSRuby – use the R environment in your Ruby program
• Rubular – test your regex on the fly
• Simile Timeline
• Scraper Wiki
• Snitch.Name – people lookup
• Tableau Public
• TimeFlow
• TinEye finds information on uploaded images, including usage, higher resolutions, modified versions
• Tweeql access the Twitter API by using SQL syntax (requires Python)
• TwitInfo chart Twitter keyword frequency and sentiment
• USA Spending – see what the US government is spending money on
 

References

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples

• NEW Journalists learning Python Google group
• NICAR ‘Net Tour – an index of links from IRE for watchdog research and learning computer-assisted reporting
• The New Precision Journalism (from Philip Meyer)
• The Logic Of Causal Order by James A. Davis (recommended by Philip Meyer)
• US Government Health Data
• Health Indicators Warehouse
• Coordinate Systems Overview for mapping
• Concepts of Probability (statistics!)
• Advanced Probability and Statistics, 2nd Ed. by the CK-12 Foundation
• Thomas Lumley: work page (statistics! and Amanda Cox’s professor)
• Hadley Wickham (statistics! and the maker of ggplot for R)
• Graphical Inference for Infovis by Hadley Wickham, Dianne Cook, Heike Hofmann and Andreas Buja (“How do we know if what we see (in a data visualization) is really there?”)
• “Be Careful What You Do With That Cell Phone Recording; It Could Land You in Jail” (from DB Smallman)
• Gary’s Social Media Count – see the volume of social media activity
• Quantitative Discovery from Qualitative Information: A General-Purpose Document Clustering Methodology by Gary King
• Producing Online News: Digital Skills, Stronger Stories by Ryan Thornburg
• US State Department Foreign Affairs Manual, section on information security, a.k.a. 12 FAM 500
• Five Databases in 50 Minutes: Government Session (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• News Apps: What Works and Why (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• Analysis-ready census data (from USA Today, available to NICAR members only)
• A directory of statistics bureaus by country (from Statistics Sweden)
• Data Visualization for Beginners (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• Tracking the Economy and Business (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• Benford’s Law (statistics!)

 

Work Samples

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples

• The Wall Street Journal investigative report, “Confidentiality Cloaks Medicare Abuse” with database created by Mo Tamman
• The Center for Public Integrity investigative report, “Unproven for Older Women, Digital Mammography Saps Medicare Dollars”
• The Year in CAR
• Des Moines Register potholes map
• FlyOnTime.us – find the most on-time flights between cities (uses US government raw data)
• Employment Market Explorer – find out what the local employment market looks like. Compare local, regional and national rates and labor market dynamics. (uses US government raw data)
• WildTrack – using data to monitor endangered species populations
• Roundup of state-based 2010 census stories
• The Killing Roads – interactive map of highway accidents in Norway
• The entire King James Bible as a word tree
• Who Runs HK – network graph of the people in power in Hong Kong
• Research by Martin Wattenberg, including the highlighted works, Name Voyager, Map of the Markets, Shape of Song and Fleshmap

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/02/24/data-visualization-tools-slides-links-nicar11/feed/ 11 Learning More Processing http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/01/24/learning-processing-kickstarter-daniel-shiffman/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/01/24/learning-processing-kickstarter-daniel-shiffman/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 06:12:04 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1280 Over the weekend, I went to Jer Thorp’s Processing and data visualization workshop to dig deeper into the program.

While I don’t have new code to show yet, today I started looking for additional learning resources. Artist Marius Watz is publishing a free series of Processing primers on Modelab. The examples are fully commented, so even if you’re fairly new, it’s easy to follow along.

Daniel Shiffman, who wrote “Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction,” is planning a new book, due to be published this summer. It’s on Kickstarter:

Daniel’s got tutorials and excerpts from his current book online for those curious about his writing style and looking for additional examples to learn from.

Have some additional sites and sample files you’d like to share? Leave a note and help create a standing resource.

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2011/01/24/learning-processing-kickstarter-daniel-shiffman/feed/ 0 Feather: Aviary’s HTML5 Photo Editor http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/11/23/feather-aviarys-html5-photo-editor/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/11/23/feather-aviarys-html5-photo-editor/#comments Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:33:51 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1158 Here’s something fun and educational: Feather, an embeddable, lightweight HTML5 photo editor by Aviary. For user instructions, see the Goodle doc.

Want your own? Get the APIkey and auto-generated code from Aviary.com

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/11/23/feather-aviarys-html5-photo-editor/feed/ 0 Playing Around in Processing http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/11/21/playing-around-in-processing/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/11/21/playing-around-in-processing/#comments Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:58:00 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1060 polka dotsSee those dots? They’re not drawn. I programmed them using a 2D and 3D development environment called Processing.

It may not look like much, but it’s a start, thanks to a workshop taught by artist and instructor Jer Thorp, who’s currently Data Artist in Residence at The New York Times.

Sounds like a very cool job to me.

Meanwhile, this week’s assignment is to build on some of the workshop exercises — and to figure out how to export the files to my server so you can interact with them.

growing boxes

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/11/21/playing-around-in-processing/feed/ 0 Journalism in the Age of Data http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/09/29/journalism-in-the-age-of-data/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/09/29/journalism-in-the-age-of-data/#comments Thu, 30 Sep 2010 01:45:08 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1053

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/09/29/journalism-in-the-age-of-data/feed/ 0 ‘Maps Are Not Neutral Documents’ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/08/17/maps-are-not-neutral-documents/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/08/17/maps-are-not-neutral-documents/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:56:41 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1040 For a few years now, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Gel Conference, where people gather to talk about experience, perception and customer service.

One of this year’s speakers was mapmaker Connie Brown of Redstone Studios. Her one-off painted maps show not just geography but perspective. In her 20-minute presentation, she shows us how maps are both descriptive and opinionated. It’s worth watching, whether your preference is for the science or the art of cartography.

Enjoy.


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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/08/17/maps-are-not-neutral-documents/feed/ 0 New York Times Graphics Editors Describe Their Process http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/08/06/new-york-times-graphics-editors-describe-their-process/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/08/06/new-york-times-graphics-editors-describe-their-process/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:09:32 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=1030 Graphics director Steve Duenes and graphics editor Archie Tse talk about what goes into the visual storytelling elements that The New York Times has become so known for.





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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/08/06/new-york-times-graphics-editors-describe-their-process/feed/ 0 The Ups and Downs of Social Networks http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/07/22/the-ups-and-downs-of-social-networks/ http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/07/22/the-ups-and-downs-of-social-networks/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:43:50 +0000 Chrys http://www.chryswu.com/blog/?p=991 Who’s got the biggest social network per country? The BBC charted Nielsen’s figures from June 2010 and from a year ago. Facebook had the largest audience by far in both months, while MySpace has dropped quite a bit.

What’s more interesting is the change in the amount of time people are spending on Facebook every month. I’d really like to know the demographics of the surveyed population. Anyone have info?

BBC charts Nielsen social network audience numbers.

(via BBC News)

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]]> http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2010/07/22/the-ups-and-downs-of-social-networks/feed/ 0