This session covered a lot of ground through back-and-forth with both the panel and the attendees, which was great. Felicity Simmons of the Lucile Packard Foundation did a nice job keeping the conversation flowing.
I was most interested in the conversation about how to extract the most powerful, portable visualizations from a complex set of data. Kurt Voelker of Forum One raised the issue, flagging the problem that so much great data lives only in text-heavy PDF files. Some tips that got tossed out:
- Get a communications person in the room with your policy or science expert from the very beginning.
- For reports, show just the findings through visualizations — those will be the most interesting pieces to pull out and highlight.
- Find a graphic designer who loves data! There isn’t an off-the-shelf way to package data visually and do it really well. It requires a good eye and design skillz.
Everyone shared tons of resources, too. I’m most excited about Tableau, software that lets you easily explore your data visually (it has a free trial and non-profit pricing plus a public free version), and Flowing Data, a blog that features cool visualizations. Thanks to the guys at Velir for recommending them!
See lots more links in the session’s Twitter stream, which is on the session page.
I’ve been playing around (while I can!!!) with javascript libraries like raphael.js and have been pretty impressed with the visualization capabilities are. Even whipped up a simple map pretty quickly: http://www.climateatlas.org/raphael/raphael_demo.html
(map shows the largest 500 power plants in the US, states are shaded by the simple number of power plants)
Also like google’s visualizations quite a bit, especially since they are tied to the other handy dandy APIs like maps and fusion tables.
Best of all, these are free…so no need to spend money on software!
Downside: you have to be a developer of some skill to utilize them!
[...] (or create) some maps we’ve worked with using Tableau Public, which I learned about at a really good data visualization session at last year’s NTEN [...]