Zircle For Ecosystem Mapping
Recent Posts
Range plots ≠ dot plots
Range plots always have seemed a bit elitist to me. It’s one of those types of charts that people who want to show how skilled they are at visualization use.
My week at OpenVisConf 2017 in tweets – or, how I learned to stop hating and be okay with Tableau
I never thought I’d be so basic as to use Tableau Public, but it’s important to keep in mind the end goal of data visualization is insight, not technology or tools.
Surveying the intersectional identity of the data journalism and civic-tech ecosystems
An explication of the interdisciplinary overlaps and differences between recent technology-driven social change movmements
Using CartoDB to visualize the relationship between private prisons and incarceration rates
The last post I wrote about CartoDB used the CartoDB API and Leaflet.js to produce a hover tooltip map of census data. Looking back, while it’s quite useful to learn CartoDB’s API, it’s now possible to achieve those same visual cues and interactivity without spending time wading through complex, undocumented JavaScript.
Defending interactive visualization and data journalism against the cult of the static and the simplistic
Tufte’s illustration of what he famously dubbed ‘The Flatland’ –– the two-dimensional, static and shallow state of information graphics –– in his 1980 work Envisioning Information In Dec. 2014, the Economist boldly proclaimed in its popular “Graphic Detail” blog that “the genre of interactive visualization is leaping ahead of static charts . . . Online, interactive charts will become the norm, nudging aside paper-based, static ones.” The proclamation from the British-based, internationally-circulated newsweekly was hardly...
Developing an open standard for municipal procurement data
When we talk about redundancy and inefficiency in municipal governments, we almost always come back to the complex topic of procurement. That’s why we need open standards for procurment policies more than ever.
Webinar-Data Viz 101 Transforming Raw Data Into Interactive Stories With Little To No Coding Knowledge
Just a quick note that I’ll be teaching a webinar sponsored by PBS MediaShift on data visualization basics at 1 p.m. today. Join in if you’re interested. We’ll cover the basics and best practices of interactive data viz, as well as look at some tools that can make visualization faster when in a time crunch. Here are just a few of those tools.
Using plot.ly to analyze and visualize data dynamically
It’s been a while since I’ve had the leisure to play with new open-source tools for data journalism. It’s been even longer since I’ve written a tutorial. Today I wanted to explore a fairly WYSIWYG web app Plotly. Although most of the features on face value appear to be not much more than what you can do in Google Visualization Playground or an open-source library like Highcharts.js – basic chart types on-the-fly, hover interactions –...
Making the case for the “post-platform” journalist
Yesterday, I presented a five-minute lightning talk at the Center for Collaborative Journalism on what I’m tentatively calling the “post-platform” journalist. From “print journalist”, to “data journalist”, to “multimedia journalist” and even to “social journalist,” it seems as though the qualifiers that often get placed before the word “journalist” abound in almost cliche numbers. Each of these “types” of journalism typically seek to clarify the platform in which the individual tells the story rather than the content...