This administration is doing a good job of opening data up to the American public – from the creation of data.gov to the appointment of Edward Tufte to the Whitehouse advisory panel for improving the display of information on recovery.gov. Other government institutions though have a way to go. In this post I’m going to pick on the …
Monthly Archive
for: ‘June, 2010’
American Time Use Survey – How the WSJ could do better
I recently posted about how the Wall Street Journal’s graphical interpretation of the American Time Use Survey left something to be desired. Their choice of both multiple pie charts and stacked bars with too many segments made comparisons difficult. The time use survey is essentially “how does the average American spend their day” with categories …
Wall Street Journal a way off New York Times standard..
It would seem that the Wall Street Journal has a way to go before approaching the data visualization excellence of the New York Times. The above data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. The pie chart is broken for the usual reasons – 3D, too many segments, have to refer …
Effective Use of Sparklines in Blog Posts
/* “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” is applicable to many aspects of life including how we choose to display information. Just because we can draw a pie chart with 50 segments, doesn’t mean that we should. I recently posted a workbook to create sparklines in Twitter – they are created using text …
Sparklines in Blogger and WordPress Blog Posts
Thanks to the developers of graphical Javascript libraries, adding sparklines to static html pages is relatively trivial . Unfortunately I’ve found it completely non-trivial to add sparklines to blog posts. What are your options for adding sparklines to posts on Wordpress, Blogger, and other content management systems?
Twitter Sparkline Generator!
The app that everyone’s been waiting for. After months (20 minutes) of coding and Q&A, Data Driven is proud to release Sparkbars! In Twitter! v2.0 You may need to right click and save as an xls to stop the .zip being added. As Twitter now accepts Unicode, we can use the block elements to create …
Web-deployed dashboards without Flash or expensive BI tools (Protovis)
I discussed recently about how new javascript libraries (especially Protovis) have the potential to revolutionize information delivery to the web. As I haven’t seen any examples of these libraries being used to create a dashboard, I thought I’d be the first. This is my first iteration (click for the big, real version) – don’t read anything into the choice …
Third-dimension in visualizations – 1st person shooter steering
Recently I posted about visualizations and 3D, surmising that without due care, and appropriate use, 3D will be like when we could suddenly tilt pie charts and give them a gradient color effect. Wunderground.com (previous musings on their information graphics – I do really like the site by the way) has produced a 3D weather radar. You fly …
Google Intensity Map
Quite how I keep ending up with map visualizations on this blog, I don’t know. Choropleth maps are rarely useful – the example below, population density of states, would be much nicer on a sorted bar chart. But there you go. This uses Google’s Intensity Map script
