Strata Gems: Quick starts for charts
We’re publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday’s Gem: Use Write your own visualizations. If you’re trying to summarize your data, you’ll likely show it in a chart. It’s easy to reach for a “standard” option, perhaps even the much-maligned pie chart: few of us leave education with a repertoire of more than a few chart types. Aside from giving your audience visual ennui, the usual suspects can be limited in what they convey. This probably isn’t news to you. Excel: Chart Chooser Juice Analytics’ Chart Chooser is a chart-style recommendation engine. Going one step further than just recommendation, the chart chooser offers Excel and Powerpoint template files that you can alter and fill with your own data. Some of the 17 chart types available from Chart Chooser R: Advanced Charts If you’re using the R statistical computing package, many chart types become available to you. The Web: Tableau Public Tableau is a leading visualization software package.
How to make your infographics accessible and SEO friendly at the same time
Infographics are everywhere. Some good - some bad. But most creators don't stop to think how to make sure search engines can understand their infographic - or how people who can't see pictures can consume them (maybe because they rely on screen readers or have chosen not to download images to their mobile phone). The trick to make infographics accessible and SEO friendly is to ensure: they're chopped into relevant sections (ie not one big image),text is text (you should be able to select it with a mouse)if anything has to be shown as an image, you set appropriate ALT text (the flipside of this is that, if the image doesn't add any information, you DON'T set ALT text - I'll explain this below.) Making an infographic accessible There's lots of infographics out there. Also I should point out that I'm a crap HTML coder so if anyone can improve on this, do let me know. Separate images and text As it stands, that bottom left bit is just part of an enormous image. What now? OK, you're thinking.
Brain Games for Adults
Brain games are fun to play at gatherings, meetings, kitty parties or on outings. Most of the brain games usually include trick questions and brain teasers, or some very hard riddles. The following are some brain games that you can play in both small and large groups. The Stroop Test The Stroop test is a brilliant way to test a person's mental flexibility and concentration. Analogy This game is a favorite among kids, but can be played by adults too. The Face of the Penny This is a very nice brain game for adults. Concentrating on Numbers Among all the brain games for adults, this one is rather popular. If you are in a small group then it would be appropriate to play some nice math riddles and puzzles.
VisualEyes
dataist blog: An inspiring case for journalists learning to code | Dan Nguyen pronounced fast is danwin
About a year ago I threw up a long, rambling guide hoping to teach non-programming journalists some practical code. Looking back at it, it seems inadequate. Actually, I misspoke, I haven’t looked back at it because I’m sure I’ll just spend the next few hours cringing. For example, what a dumb idea it was to put everything from “What is HTML” to actual Ruby scraping code all in a gigantic, badly formatted post. The series of articles have gotten a fair number of hits but I don’t know how many people were able to stumble through it. Mapping of Ratata blogging network by Jens Finnäs of dataist.wordpress.com I hope other non-coders who are still intimidated by the thought of learning programming are inspired by Finnas’s example. ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs project originated in part from this Pfizer-scraping lesson I added on to my programming tutorial: I needed a timely example of public data that wasn’t as useful as it should be. In fact, just knowing to avoid taking notes like this:
Home - Gymnasium for Brain
d3.js
Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series | Dan Nguyen pronounced fast is danwin
Photo by Nico Cavallotto on Flickr Update, January 2012: Everything…yes, everything, is superseded by my free online book, The Bastards Book of Ruby, which is a much more complete walkthrough of basic programming principles with far more practical and up-to-date examples and projects than what you’ll find here. I’m only keeping this old walkthrough up as a historical reference. So check it out: The Bastards Book of Ruby -Dan Update, Dec. 30, 2010: I published a series of data collection and cleaning guides for ProPublica, to describe what I did for our Dollars for Docs project. So a little while ago, I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites. As the tutorials are aimed at people who aren’t experienced programming, the code is pretty verbose, pedantic, and in some cases, a little inefficient.
jStat : a JavaScript statistical library
Data journalism pt1: Finding data (draft – comments invited)
{*style:<i>The following is a draft from a book about online journalism that I’ve been working on. I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around sources of data and legal considerations </i>*} The first stage in data journalism is sourcing the data itself. Often you will be seeking out data based on a particular question or hypothesis (for a good guide to forming a journalistic hypothesis see Mark Hunter’s free ebook Story-Based Inquiry (2010)). On other occasions, it may be that the release or discovery of data itself kicks off your investigation. There are a range of sources available to the data journalist, both online and offline, public and hidden. national and local government; bodies that monitor organisations (such as regulators or consumer bodies); scientific and academic institutions; health organisations; charities and pressure groups; business; and the media itself. Private companies and charities Regulators, researchers and the media Live data
