New Zealand/Information Visualisation

[[image:icon_objectives.jpg]] Objective
We try and reflect as much as possible what is being done in the industry.

[[Image:Farm-Fresh_blogs.png|32px]] NZ Standards
Key words in standards like "investigate" or "collect" tend to point to activities that could give way to a report that includes data or information visualization for an Internal assessment.

"collect"


Collect doesn't mean more than obtain and store data. This can be done with Google or Office Spreadsheet or new Google DataWiki. But plotting data can help spot abnormal data that come from encoding errors. It may also help to see patterns more clearly.

For instance:
 * This Tract provides a view of Census data on your block
 * Haiti’s earthquake in context
 * Where the public gets its news
 * When & Where Are People Using Mobile Devices?

"compare"


For instance:
 * States with the most and fewest firearms murders

"investigate" or "investigation"


For instance:
 * Charted guide to fancy drinks
 * How Starbucks’ new Trenta compares to your stomach
 * T-shirt life cycle

"analyse" or "data analysis"


For instance
 * A history of Coen brothers filmography
 * Dexter’s victims through season five
 * Hey Jude flowchart
 * TagCrowd or Wordle will create a tag cloud when you paste some text.
 * watch the world get fatter

Infographic or Visual Information Design
Infographics are static visualizations.

Examples: Infographics at Good, 35 Great Visualizations (many Geographical & Historical)

Theory: Infographics, Exploring Visual Information Design

Dynamic Visualization
Visualization that changes over time. Typically governed by some timeLine.

Dynamic Visualization: Introduction & Theory

Interactive Visualization
Visualization that changes with user interaction.

Examples:
 * PISA profiles Visualisation of PISA profiles, Complex visualisation of international edu data.
 * NZ walks information

Real-time Visualization
The visualization is computed on the fly, depending of the data available at the moment. Involves programming (what some call Computational Information Design), at the very least access to a webservice that will provide the real-time data.

Example: Twitter network Visualisation

Data Visualization
Example: stats R gallery

Types:
 * Visualization Design Patterns
 * Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics. Shows you what type of data representation should be used for Comparison, Distribution, Trend, Relationship, Table.
 * Types of Information Visualization
 * Visualization Options Available in Many Eyes
 * A periodic table fo visualization methods
 * How to Find the Right Chart Type for your Numeric Data

Theory:
 * Look out for Edward Tufte. He published books like "Envisioning Information", "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi", "Visual Explanations"

Design Techniques:
 * Design Patterns for Data Graphics

Network Graphs
Twitter Graphs

TweetWheel – Twitter Social Graph

webpages as Graphs

Social Data and Data for social activitism
MashBlock, demographic data from the last NZ Census for a particular Meshblock, Area Unit or Council. Social Explorer (US)

MapLight.org, charts the links between politicians and money.

Social Media Research Foundation

Personal Data
Reviews of submissions for an award for best personal visualization project 2008, at Flowing Data.

Information Visualization
When static, infographics (see above).

Visual Complexity

The Facts and Figures of 2010 in 30 Amazing Infographics

[[Image:Nuvola_apps_kghostview.png|32px]] Finding Data and Information to show
Consider using data directly relevant to the learner - have them record data about themselves
 * Track-n-Graph, a free web-based service for friends, family, and co-workers to track and graph information
 * Poyozo, a project to help you track and understand your life by integrating automatic lifetracking with simple visualizations that you can use every day.
 * runkeeper, to track your workouts

Data relevant to course content
 * Climate Database Climate Database
 * wunderground website to check out rainfall, other weather measurements. Search city, and then private stations. If you drill down Station > Stats for this date > view more history data > weekly, you get, at the bottom of the page, a table with measurements for the 7 days  of the week.
 * Nationa Vegetation Survey National Vegetation Survey datasets

Data about NZ Education
 * Education Counts.

NZ data across the board:
 * Satistics NZ Statistics NZ.
 * open.org.nz open.org.nz
 * data.gov.nz data.gov.nz.

Worldwide Data
 * DataMarket, with their motto "Visualize the world's economy, societies, nature, and industries, and gain new insights".
 * Pachube, Store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world.
 * Manyeyes and the various datasets uploaded by members of its community.

Collecting and Storing Data
Standard: s00103	Use data entry skills to input data

For teachers to start their own visualisation. Google recently added a new project to its lab. DataWiki. You can create datasets easily and a basic search interface will be automatically created to let you interact with data. datawiki

manyeyes is a community portal that let you upload dataset and apply visualisation to them.

Images +Text, beginners
Any office software like Powerpoint / Present that let you import images and shapes.

Images +Text, advanced
Gimp

Data Graphs
Create Graphs Online with Google Chart Maker, with a link to ChartMaker

A few web apps or community website have started to appear that let you upload your dataset and visualize it online. ManyEyes is a great example. Create your own or explore the numerous visualizations created by other users.

Graph generation itself can be done easily with any opensource library. Most of them provide simple ways to specify the data list. I provided an example of a javascript barGraph – This could be relevant to: s90641, Determine the trend for time series data, level 3,1S, credits 3, Internal

Stats R statsR. You can write and save scripts that will automatically generate graphs for data. I had used it a few years ago to rapidly generate distribution graphs for a urvey on webCT use in my department. The survey itself had been prepared and run by students.

Orange Widgets Open source data visualization and analysis for novice and experts. Data mining through visual programming.

Prefuse Library (Actionscript) Prefuse Visualization Gallery

Information Graphic
Make Your Own Infographic

Interactive Content, no computing
I haven’t tried it out much, but there is an open source project providing more complex visualisation of relevance to education: simile widgets. Plenty of open source visualisation software exist but they tend to be more specialized and more difficult to use in an education context.

Interactive Content, computing involved
processing (simplified Java integrated environment)

Real-time Computing
Drawing graphs programmatically doesn’t necessarily require complex skills. Probably within the reach of any kid enrolling in some program to help them learn basics of programming. This can also be used as an assignment: s18740	Create a simple computer program to meet a set brief, level 2, credits 3, Internal or s18741, Create a computer program to provide a solution, level 3Once the plugin behaves as expected, non-technical users only need to edit the html portion. A webform of some kind could be used to make the task even less confusing to first graders.

The challenge is to present data that are directly relevant to the kids. That is, data about themselves. Something to investigate is the ability to interact with google spreadsheets with webservices: saving form data to google spreadsheets. One possible use is the automatic generation of graphs based on data entered by kids on the spreadsheet. Another possible use is to create a personalized clicker device for your classroom (assuming your are in a computer lab, with kids having access to computers or mobile devices). You ask a question. Kids answer anonymously, on their device, their get immediate feedback on their screen. When they all answered, you show them a distribution graph (with the rule that if less than 50% got it right, you clarify the answer). Or you keep the graph for yourself.

Visualization in Education, Tips
Rethinking Data Visualization: From Dynamic Illustration to Analytic Narrative by Ruben R. Puentedura, author of numerous articles on how to integrate technology and education.

Mapping Science, meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. Provides a gallery of infographics on scientific data.

BBC - KS1 Bitesize Games - Numeracy - Data handling interactive

BBC - KS2 Bitesize: Maths - Interpreting data - activity

Statistics Canada
 * Statistics: Power from Data! - published primarily for secondary students of Mathematics and Information Studies, although it is expected that the product will find a wider use among other students, teachers and the general population.

Visualization outside Education
Information Architecture and Data Visualization Resources

InfoGraphic Designs: Overview, Examples and Best Practices

Vizlist entries on Max Kiesler's blog

Visual Complexity - VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.

Infosthetics - "Where form follows data".

Random Etc., Tom Carden's blog

Simple Complexity - "Making Simple Sense From Complex Data"

Accuracy and Aesthetics

Information and Visualization - A blog is all about "information and visualization, but not in the restricted sense of the academic information visualization community".

Flowing Data

Perceptual Edge, a blog by Stephen Few, expert in (Business) Data Analysis.

Delicious (blacklisted, link not allowed) - /popular/visualization

175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources