#CAST12 DataViz Sandbox – Resources

I had a trip up to London yesterday to give the second of two talks on data visualisation to the #cast12 Masters students at Goldsmiths University. As promised to them, here’s a list of resources they might find useful..:

1) Storytelling with data – Hans Rosling demoing Gapminder (using a visualisation technique now often referred to as a motion chart; see the orginal here: Gapminder).

(See also the BBC4 programme fronted by Hans Rosling, “The Joy of Stats”).

How line graphs can narrate a story – Kurt Vonnegut on the Shape of Stories

The Charts’n’things blog, which describes some of the design process that goes on in coming up with some of the great visualisations produced by the New York Times.

2) Google Refine

Google RefineOpenRefine is one of those tools that can make one of the more painful parts of producing visualisations – getting data into a state where you can actually use it – much more manageable. Here are some example use cases:

• Grabbing Twitter Search Results into Google Refine And Exporting Conversations into Gephi
• Data Shaping in Google Refine – Generating New Rows from Multiple Values in a Single Column
• Chit Chat with New Datasets – Facets in OpenRefine (Was /Google Refine/)

3) API datagrabs and screenscraping. Here are some handy resources:

• Scraperwiki – a hosted environment for writing scrapers in Python, Ruby or PHP and storing the scraped data in an API accessible SQLLite database. There are several examples of Twitter scrapers on there…
• Grabbing Twitter Search Results into Google Refine And Exporting Conversations into Gephi
• Looking up Images Trademarked By Companies Using OpenCorporates and Google Refine
• Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets

4) Gephi tutorials:

• “Drug Deal” Network Analysis with Gephi (Tutorial)
• Visualising Twitter Friend Connections Using Gephi: An Example Using the @WiredUK Friends Network
• Getting Started With The Gephi Network Visualisation App – My Facebook Network, Part I
• Emergent Social Interest Mapping – Red Bull Racing Facebook Group (updated script as demoed here).
• Social Interest Positioning – Visualising Facebook Friends’ Likes With Data Grabbed Using Google Refine
• Visualising F1 Timing Sheet Data (aka using Gephi to generate bubble charts or x=y scatterplots).
• You can load simple CSV files into Gephi using the File-Open route, but the importer can be a bit flakey. A more robust route is via the Data Explorer tab – Gephi: Import CSV Data (h/t @sapitoenred for sharing the link). In the past there has be an issue with the Import CSV button not working in the Data Explorer – if you “Create New Project” it should be enabled.

5) General.
(Social) network analysis – a theoretical overview: Social Network Analysis – G. Cheliotis.

There are a few extras in there, but anything I missed?