Top 15 Data Visualization Tips
This image gallery offers best-practice examples, advice, free resources and insight from experts on the best of data and information visualization.
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Data Visualization Advice, Examples and Free Resources
"Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency," writes information visualization guru and author Edward R. Tufte. Expert Stephen Few preaches simplicity, decrying distorted 3D pie charts and graphics that are too hard to read. This image gallery offers best-practice examples, advice, free resources and insight from experts on the best of data and information visualization. Visitors to NYTimes.com will find a treasure trove of superlative infographics, many of which tell a story through interaction with the data. Gapminder compares and contrasts the health and wealth of nations over time with time-series analyses. Zillow mashes up real estate data with maps to deliver insights into personal wealth and potential opportunities. IBM's Many Eyes Alphaworks project brings visibility to important social issues and to whatever data sets you care to upload. We also point you to industry experts and downloadable and Web-accessible resources that will help you hone your data visualization skills.
PowerPoint for Data Visualization: Ubiquitious But Flawed
PowerPoint is undoubtedly the most widely used data presentation tool (by way of its "Insert Chart" function), but it wins few friends among visualization experts. PowerPoint templates tend to "weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis," writes guru Edward Tufte.
Infographic Teachings from the New York Times
The New York Times is well known for its superlative infographics, many of which are dynamic and interactive when accessed online, like the time-series visualization of the Gulf oil spill pictured here, while also generating static print graphics for the print newspaper. The Times recently featured a compelling multimedia compendium of videos, blogs and articles entitled "Teaching with Infographics: Places to Start." The week-long series includes multiple links on NYTimes.com's "Learning Network."
Time-Series Analyses Capture Health and Wealth Trends
The Gapminder Foundation created Trendalyzer software to help turn dry statistics about differences among rich and poor nations and the well being of their people into easily understandable interactive graphics. Google acquired the Trendalyzer technology in 2007, but it is still used by Gapminder to track statistical, time-series trends impacting the world.
Mashup Mixes Maps and Home Value Data
Zillow.com has long mashed up home value data with satellite and street views (now provided by Bing). The real estate bust has brought a new twist: spotting homes in foreclosure as possible investment opportunities. This view shows 31 homes in foreclosure in Norwood, NJ, as of Sept. 1 2010. A click one of the homes release details about the number of beds, baths, square footage, etc.
Many Eyes: Sharing Insights on Social Impacts
IBM describes its Many Eyes Alphaworks project as "a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns." The free site lets you upload and analyze data, aiming to "democratize visualization and enable a new social kind of data analysis." This sample analysis compares the greenhouse gas emissions of various nations.
Spotting Hot Spots With Heat Maps
Want to develop a Heat Map mashup using Google Maps and the Heat Map API? GeoSpatial Training Services shows you how it's done at CeoChalkboard.com. This heat map show the concentration of more than 600 Starbucks store closures during the company's 2009 reorganization. GeoSpatial Training Services offers no-cost and low-cost training on the use of Google Earth, Google Maps and various geospatial information systems.
Build Graphics the Google Way
The Google Chart API lets you generate and embed charts on web pages or download the image for local or offline use. HTML experience helps, but the API is free and Google's Chart Wizard, shown here, helps simplify tasks that used to require extensive coding.
A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words
Tag cloud visualizations demonstrate that words can tell a visual story. Wordle.net lets you enter text or the URL of a website or blog and literally see what the content is all about. The largest words are those that appear most frequently. This Word Cloud interprets Stephen Few's "Visual Business Intelligence" blog.
JQuery Plug-in Delivers Efficient Sparkline Visualizations
Sparklines show trends in data, yet they are compact and efficient enough to appear within lines of text or in stock tables. The JQuery Sparklines plug-in developed by Gareth Watts for Splunk works with the open source JQuery JavaScript Library, which is aimed at simplifying and speeding web development.
Free Site Lets You Embed Compelling Visualizations
Videos and photos are typically the stuff of social networking. But data is typically a second-class citizen. Tableau Software hopes to change that with TableauPublic.com, a free site that lets you create a variety of advanced data visualizations and publish them to blogs, websites or intranets or share links via email or Twitter. This TableauPublic-generated graphic shows how long it took 100 technology vendors to reach $50 million in revenue. Hover over a line and it reveals details about the vendor in question.
Data Visualization Software Is Freeā¦ For One Year
Tibco bills Tibco Silver Spotfire as a cloud-based BI and data visualization offering, but it all starts with conventional software. You can download and use the company's desktop authoring client (shown here) for one year at no charge. When you're ready to share visualizations with others, you publish them to Tibco's hosted collaboration environment. Fee-based hosting services are available once the trial period is over.
Tufte Preaches Clarity, Precision and Efficiency
Edward R. Tufte has written seven influential books on data visualization, including "Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information," and his landmark "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." The last of these begins with a simple sentence that sums up Tufte's philosophy: "Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency."
Nepoleon's March on Moscow: A Data-Rich Depiction of Disaster
In his courses and in his book "The visual Display of Quantitative Information," Tufte cites the notable example of this data-rich depiction of Napoleon's 1812 march on Moscow, originally drawn by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869 (and translated by Dawn Finley and redrawn here by Elaine Morse in 2002). As shown by the thick, brown line, Napoleon's army crosses into Russia from Poland in June with 422,000 troops. The line gets proportionally thinner, indicating casualties as the battle move eastward. Only 100,000 troops reach a sacked and deserted Moscow by September. An early and bitterly cold winter, with temperatures dipping down to minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit (as shown by the scale at the bottom of the chart), forced a disastrous retreat. The steadily narrowing black line shows the grim toll as troops succumb to starvation, exposure and drowning at icy river crossings). Only 10,000 troops make it back into Poland. Tufte calls it "a visual War and Peace" and "the greatest anti-war poster ever created."
Stephen Few on Better Data Presentation and Analysis
While Tufte leans toward historical examples and visualization philosophy, Stephen Few offers more practical and business-oriented advice on better approaches and techniques. His latest book, Now You See It, delves into data analysis while his earlier book, Show Me the Numbers, concentrates on data presentation.
Visualization Dos and Don'ts
Stephen Few's Perceptual Edge website and Visual Business Intelligence blog are great, instructional resources as well as outlets for Few rants against the evils of pie charts, 3D displays and needlessly complex visualizations. In this tutorial from Few's examples page, he turns a hard-to-read pie chart into a simple, easy-to-read bar chart.
Visualization Dos and Don'ts
Stephen Few's Perceptual Edge website and Visual Business Intelligence blog are great, instructional resources as well as outlets for Few rants against the evils of pie charts, 3D displays and needlessly complex visualizations. In this tutorial from Few's examples page, he turns a hard-to-read pie chart into a simple, easy-to-read bar chart.
Data Visualization Advice, Examples and Free Resources
"Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency," writes information visualization guru and author Edward R. Tufte. Expert Stephen Few preaches simplicity, decrying distorted 3D pie charts and graphics that are too hard to read. This image gallery offers best-practice examples, advice, free resources and insight from experts on the best of data and information visualization. Visitors to NYTimes.com will find a treasure trove of superlative infographics, many of which tell a story through interaction with the data. Gapminder compares and contrasts the health and wealth of nations over time with time-series analyses. Zillow mashes up real estate data with maps to deliver insights into personal wealth and potential opportunities. IBM's Many Eyes Alphaworks project brings visibility to important social issues and to whatever data sets you care to upload. We also point you to industry experts and downloadable and Web-accessible resources that will help you hone your data visualization skills.
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