Paul and I are giving a workshop at Scottish Parliament on Tuesday 12th February 2013. Our SPICe colleagues have been kind to suggest topics up front, so we are pleased to say that the presentation will incorporate a wide variety of examples. Below we have compiled a list of websites which will come in handy for delegates.

Presentation related links:

Slideshare
The Guardian datablog
Where does my money go?
Bubbletree
BBC: Eurozone debt web
D3
New York Times: Euro debt crisis
Tufte’s rules
Stephen Few: The chart junk debate
Colourlovers
Color schemer
Color brewer
Simon Rogers: How to make a map with Google fusion tables
Mapbox
The Guardian: US election 

Tools:

IRISS’ Look
Many Eyes
Google Fusion Tables
Tableau
Ushahidi
Piktochart
Dipity
Visually
Easelly
Infogram
SVG editor
Inkscape
Mapbox

Image by Wil Freeborn

On 21st March 2012 Paul, Ben and I are offering our time in neatly apportioned sessions to co-create data visualisations with people in the Scottish social services sector who would like to try to visualise the data they deal with on a day-to-day basis.

The event is free, the coffee will be strong, and all that is required to attend a session is some tabulated data. No prior knowledge of data visualisation is required.

Alongside visualising we also want to talk about what we do, how we do it and we want to hear people’s opinions and ideas. So we have also added chairs for spectators, commentators, people keen to talk about data visualisation. We call these curiosity seats. So if you are someone, or know someone, who would just like to come along and see how it all comes together then that is possible as well.

Details of the event can be found  here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/2981954105/esearch?srnk=1&ebtv=C

Any questions or comments, please let me know!

Rikke

Ben and I have been thinking about how best to represent visually the Scottish social services workforce, how they are represented within each service sector and what significant changes have taken place over the last couple of years.

Together we came up with the above. What do you think? It’s more of a infographic than a visualisation but we like it. As usual, Ben was the programming and design wizard, whereas my own input was limited to data, fonts and colours, and Paul acted as our editor.

All comments welcome as well as suggestions for other data you think would be illustrated well with the use of isotypes. – Get in touch!

Rikke

At the moment Paul and I are working on creating an online map for our colleague Lisa‘s project which aims to map mental well-being assets in East Dunbartonshire Council.

I am especially keen to ensure that the map stays up-to-date and that everyone who lives in the area can contribute their knowledge and experience to the map, thus enriching the resource. So the right way to go is crowd sourcing data…

Over the last couple of year I have been following lots of mapping exercises and various ways of collecting data and keep being both amazed and inspired at how quickly maps can be put together by people who have never met but each have information which contributes to the story the map is telling. In the last few days a Google map has been created to track the riots in London. It is both fascinating and heartbreaking to follow the developments through the population of the map. – It is data by the people, for the people. It is so like what Paul and I are working on, and so distant from it.

Rikke

IRISS’s bimonthly data visualisation and infographic meetup was held on Wednesday 20th April 2011.

The evening’s two presenters, Ben Lyons and Hoss Gifford, shared their enthusiasm and knowledge of data visualisation.

Ben presented the results of his recent practical experience using Scraperwiki at the BBC’s Hacks and Hackers day, a one-day project which has turned hitherto impenetrable fire service data into a live updated map and a Twitter feed.

Hoss presented a very engaging and inspiring insight into data visualisation, drawing from various sources, such as his own experience with learning times tables as well as variety of online visualisation tools.

Ben Lyons presenting his Scraperwiki project:

Hoss Gifford on data visualisation:

Hoss’ slideset: Hoss-DataViz-Meetup-GLA

The next Data Visualisation& Infographics meetup will be on Wednesday 22nd June 2011. For more information or to get involved, click here.

Come along!

Recently the multi-talented IRISS programmer, Ben Lyons tool part in the BBC’s scraperwiki hacks and hackers day. The event focussed on getting hacks (journalists) and hackers (programmers) to work together on developing a tool which would bridge the two worlds.  Ben and programmer Paul Miller formed a team with theBBC journalist Chris Sleight who reports on the central scotland area (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeH6Ca77coY).

Chris had an interest in obtaining data from the central scotland fire and rescue service(http://www.centralscotlandfire.gov.uk/news/latest-incidents/recorded-incidents.html), which the team agreed to focus on. While this site was useful to Chris, there was also no easy way for him to obtain updates when there is an fire incident, nor a way to use the data in any really meaningful way.

After some intial digging the team found a way to use scraperwiki to scrape limited data from the site (at circa 60 records at a time), and also discovered another 14,460 historical records, which allow them to start building several outputs.

Within one day the team managed to build a dynamic protoviz visualisation from within scraperwiki (http://scraperwikiviews.com/run/firebug_simple_viz_2/), as well as extract some very useful statistics (the one they chose to work with on the day was the percentage of malicious calls per area). They also did some initial work on creating geo-mapping views, which is one of IRISS’s focus for its data visualisation team this year.

For the team’s impressive efforts they were awarded second place on the day, and also won the scraperwiki “best scraper” award.

As a follow up, Paul Miller spent some time the following week finalising some additional features, including notifications on twitter @FireCentralScot and an interactive googlemap (http://central-scotland-fire-reports.paulmiller.it/fire/map/custom ).

You can watch Ben speaking about this great event on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RQ1f6vUMoM

Well done, Ben!