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Visual.ly: The Future of Data-Based Infographics

EAGEREYES – By Robert Kosara

Visual.ly‘s launch today made big waves, but a lot of people seemed to be disappointed by what they saw. The problem is that what you can see on the website is not the really exciting part of Visual.ly. What is much more interesting is how they want to turn the creation of data-based graphics from a tedious manual process into something fast and flexible. That has a lot more potential impact than you might realize at first.

Exploration, Analysis, Presentation

Let’s take a step back and look at the three stages we generally talk about in visualization: exploration, analysis, and presentation. Academic work and tools like Tableau focus on the first two, while there is still very little actual work on the latter. The usual assumption is that the same tools and techniques can be used there as for exploration and analysis, and little attention is typically paid to it.

The result is that presentation is taken over by infographics with varying levels of quality, because people simply get tired of looking at the same bar chart for every piece of data. I think it’s clear that infographics aren’t just popular, they are also more memorable, and when they’re done well, can be very effective.

The key difference between visualization and infographics is that the former is easy to automate and generic, while the latter are specific and usually hand-drawn. Now imagine a better way to create infographics based on data: a way that lets designers work with numbers more easily to create graphics that are visually exciting while still true to the data; a way that encourages and embodies best practices in visualization for designers. That’s Visual.ly. [Read more…]

 

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7 ways to get data out of PDFs

HELP ME INVESTIGATE – By  Paul Bradshaw

A frequent obstacle in data journalism is when the information you want to analyse is locked away in a PDF. Here are 6 ways to tackle that problem – with space for a 7th:

1) For simple PDFs: Google Docs’ conversion facility

 

Google Docs recently added a feature that allows you to convert a PDF to a ‘Google document’ when you upload it. It’s pretty powerful, and about the simplest way you can extract information.

 

It does not work, however, if the PDF was generated by scanning – in other words if it is an image, rather than a document that has been converted to PDF.

 

2) For scanned documents and pulling out key players: Document Cloud

 

Document Cloud is a tool for journalists to convert PDFs to text. It will also add ‘semantic’ information along the way, such as what organisations, people and ‘entities’ such as dates and locations are mentioned within it, and there are some useful features that allow you to present documents for others to comment on.

 

The good news is that it works very well with scanned documents, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The bad news is that you need to ask permission to use it, so if you don’t work as a professional journalist you may not be able to use it. Still, there’s no harm in asking. [Read more…]

 

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16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools

MASHABLE – by 

From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful.

Visualize Your Network with Fidg’t
Fidg’t is a desktop application that aims to let you visualize your network and its predisposition for different types of things like music and photos. Currently, the service has integrated with Flickr and last.fm, so for example, Fidg’t might show you if your network is attracted or repelled by Coldplay, or if it has a predisposition to taking photos of their weekend partying. As the service expands to support other networks (they suggest integrations with Facebook, digg, del.icio.us, and several others are in the works), this one could become very interesting.

See Where Flickr Photos are Coming From
Flickrvision combines Google Maps and Flickr to provide a real-time view of where in the world Flickr photos are being uploaded from. You can then enlarge the photo or go directly to the user’s Flickr page.

See Where Twitters are Coming From
From the maker of Flickrvision (David Troy) comes Twittervision, which, you guessed it, shows where in the world the most recent Twitters are coming from. Troy has taken things one step further with Twitter vision and has given each user a page where you can see all of their location updates.

New Ways to Visualize Real-Time Activity on Digg
Digg Labs offers three different ways to visualize activity in real-time on the site, building on the original Digg Spy feature.

BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. Stories with more diggs show up in a bigger font, and next to each one you can see the number of diggs in red:

[Read more…]