Piton Data Lab

Sparkwise is a free, open source web-based tool, aimed at the non-profit sector, for creating live data-widget-filled dashboards.

Their tagline: “Sparkwise gives meaning to your data and momentum to your goals.”

You can use add widgets that visualize data — your own data, data from a social media or web feed like Twitter followers, Google Analytics, etc. — or display photos, videos and text. Moving and re-sizing the widgets, you can build your own customized dashboard layout.

Sparkwise also provides some tips for telling data stories that will most effectively engage your audience. Jeremy Lehrer has an article at Co.Design that goes into deeper detail about Sparkwise’s motivation and features.

Piton, in partnership with the Denver Foundation, is working to build two data and storytelling platforms that touch on some of the same goals as Sparkwise:

• Floodlight, a community storytelling tool for creating and sharing data- and multimedia-rich stories.
• The Colorado Data Commons, a public data engine for finding and visualizing information.

One area we are focusing on that Sparkwise hasn’t yet tackled is how collecting data stories together in one place can build momentum and gather attention to them. Through Floodlight and the Colorado Data Commons, which will be open tools but will have a focused effort in the Children’s Corridor, we hope to affect positive change through data and storytelling. The first step to positive change will be shining — or, as we like to say, flooding — light on the unseen issues and stories within our local communities and using data to explore potential solutions.

Before Nathan Yau, before visualization software (or much software at all), before Tufte, even, there were these:

Chart Port shares three data visualization books — full of detailed hand-drawn charts, maps and graphs — in PDF form.

Occupy George provides downloadable templates for people to print infographics on dollar bills. From the website:

Money talks, but not loud enough for the 99%. By circulating dollar bills stamped with fact-based infographics, Occupy George informs the public of America’s daunting economic disparity one bill at a time. Because money knowledge is power.

Knowledge, from the BBC.

Berkeley’s journalism school partnered with GOOD Magazine and Design Matters to hold a contest asking people to redesign the nutrition label. Here’s the winner (and the audience favorite):

Simple. Colorful. Easy to read.

[h/t Nathan Yau at Flowing Data]

The ever-impressive Texas Tribune data team takes keywords from days of deliberation over the state budget and visualizes them with Highcharts.js. Nice work!

More on the entire legislative session here.

Ever wonder how a dataviz comes to life, from idea to implementation? Datavisualization.ch provides a nice anatomy of how they visualized Geography Bee data.

“A video report on data visualization as a storytelling medium produced during a 2009-2010 Knight Journalism Fellowship.”

sunfoundation:

Enhancing Map Interactivity with Google Charts

Since May TileMill - our open source map design studio - has supported putting interactive popups on maps. Having an interactive space like this creates endless possibilities for visualizing your data and communicating your message. Recently we’ve been working on a few projects where we’ve taken advantage of this space to display charts and graphs of attribute data made using Google’s Image Chart API.

This is the best collection (and description) of resources (including programming languages, mapping software, web tools, communities) I’ve seen. Very clear and thorough.

This amazing local data mapping project from the LA Times combines census, crime and other data with visualizations, maps and reader comments:

Map­ping L.A. began in 2009 with pub­lic­a­tion of The Times’ map of 87 neigh­bor­hoods in the city of Los Angeles, re­drawn with the help of read­ers who agreed or dis­agreed with our ini­tial bound­ar­ies.

But read­ers didn’t just com­ment on the bound­ar­ies; hun­dreds sent notes — short es­says, really — on the places they live. They were in­form­at­ive, hu­mor­ous, thought-pro­vok­ing and of­ten elo­quent. Now we ex­pand that con­ver­sa­tion to the en­tire county. Please use these pages to tell us more about the places you live.

“A stop-by-stop peek into NYC via the subway.”

This is an amazing example of using an identity - in this case, the personality of each individual subway stop - to explore faceless demographic data. The face you add to data to make it meaningful doesn’t always have to be human.

Visual.ly is place to explore, share and create data visualizations. Just go there right now.

Charlie Park has an excellent description of a little-used Tufte-ism, the slope graph — including when to use them, best practices and examples — on his website:

This chart does this in a remarkably minimalist way. There’s absolutely zero non-data ink.

highcountrynews:

We just ran a piece on how well rural newspapers were doing as opposed to their urban counterparts (Pretty well!). We worked with Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West to create a visualization of how newspapers, rural and urban, have changed in number and distribution from 1690 to today. You can check out the interactive visualization on our site (sorry, the photo’s just a screen shot.)