22 free tools for data visualization and analysis Review April 20, 2011 06:00 AM ET Computerworld - You may not think you've got much in common with an investigative journalist or an academic medical researcher. But if you're trying to extract useful information from an ever-increasing inflow of data, you'll likely find visualization useful -- whether it's to show patterns or trends with graphics instead of mountains of text, or to try to explain complex issues to a nontechnical audience. Want to see all the tools at once? For quick reference, check out our chart listing all the tools profiled here. There are many tools around to help turn data into graphics, but they can carry hefty price tags. Related Blog Here's a rundown of some of the better-known options, many of which were demonstrated at the Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) conference last month. Data cleaning Before you can analyze and visualize data, it often needs to be "cleaned." DataWrangler Click on a row or column, and DataWrangler will suggest changes.
The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet Back in April, we looked at an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet’s climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance. There are numerous challenges here. Nobody yet has the computing power necessary for such a task, neither are there models that will can accurately model even much smaller systems. Today, we get a grand tour of this challenge from Dirk Helbing and Stefano Balietti at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. It turns out that there are already numerous sources of data that could provide the necessary fuel to power Helbing’s Earth Simulator. WikipediaWikipedia is the most famous cooperatively edited encyclopedia. Where’s George?
Masterclass 20: Getting started in data journalism If you are impatient to get started, and just quickly do some data journalism, click here If you aren't a subscriber, you'll need to sign up before you can access the rest of this masterclass If you want to find out what data journalism is, and what it's for, before you get stuck in, then read on, or click on the video or audio files Video: Are you confused about what data journalism is, how you do it, and what its purpose is? If so, join the club. There is a mystique surrounding data journalism; it’s almost like it’s a dark art and you have to be a wizard to practise it. A very few people are brilliant at it, a number have dabbled in it, loads of journalists think they probably ought to find out about it, but most fear they probably won’t be able to master it. All this throws up a smoke screen about the subject that I hope to dispel in this masterclass. What data journalism is I am to show what data journalism is, what it can do, and how to do it.
Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. - Gapminder.org FlowingData | Data Visualization, Infographics, and Statistics Fusion Tables (Beta) Bust your data out of its silo! Get more from data with Fusion Tables. Fusion Tables is an experimental data visualization web application to gather, visualize, and share data tables. Visualize bigger table data online Filter and summarize across hundreds of thousands of rows. Two tables are better than one! Merge two or three tables to generate a single visualization that includes both sets of data. Make a map in minutes Host data online - and stay in control Viewers located anywhere can produce charts or maps from it. Visualize bigger table data online Import your own data Upload data tables from spreadsheets or CSV files, even KML. Visualize it instantly See the data on a map or as a chart immediately. Publish your visualization on other web properties Now that you've got that nice map or chart of your data, you can embed it in a web page or blog post. See how journalists and nonprofits around the world use Fusion Tables Two tables are better than one! Make a map in minutes Share that map!
Orange - Data Mining Fruitful & Fun 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. I’m sure the code is so ugly that I’m not going to even try re-reading it. 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. DISCLAIMER: The code, data files, and results are meant for reference and example only.
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