Monday, February 27, 2012

April 20, 2011 06:00 AM ET

This image gallery accompanies our story 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis. Click through to that story for the full review.

Features of 22 free data visualization and analysis tools: You can sort this chart by clicking on any column header once to sort in ascending order and a second time to sort by descending (browser JavaScript required).

Skill levels are represented as numbers from easiest to most difficult to learn and use:

Users who are comfortable with basic spreadsheet tasks
Users who are technically proficient enough not to be frightened off by spending a couple of hours learning a new application
Power users
Users with coding experience or specialized knowledge in a field like GIS or network analysis. Next page

Data visualization and analysis tools

Tool	Category	Multi-purpose visualization	Mapping	Platform	Skill level	Data stored or processed	Designed for Web publishing?
Data Wrangler	Data cleaning	No	No	Browser	2	External server	No
Google Refine	Data cleaning	No	No	Browser	2	Local	No
R Project	Statistical analysis	Yes	With plugin	Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, Windows XP or later	4	Local	No
Google Fusion Tables	Visualization app/service	Yes	Yes	Browser	1	External server	Yes
Impure	Visualization app/service	Yes	No	Browser	3	Varies	Yes
Many Eyes	Visualization app/service	Yes	Limited	Browser	1	Public external server	Yes
Tableau Public	Visualization app/service	Yes	Yes	Windows	3	Public external server	Yes
VIDI	Visualization app/service	Yes	Yes	Browser	1	External server	Yes
Zoho Reports	Visualization app/service	Yes	No	Browser	2	External server	Yes
Choosel	Framework	Yes	Yes	Chrome, Firefox, Safari	4	Local or external server	Not yet
Exhibit	Library	Yes	Yes	Code editor and browser	4	Local or external server	Yes
Google Chart Tools	Library and Visualization app/service	Yes	Yes	Code editor and browser	2	Local or external server	Yes
JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit	Library	Yes	No	Code editor and browser	4	Local or external server	Yes
Protovis	Library	Yes	Yes	Code editor and browser	4	Local or external server	Yes
Quantum GIS (QGIS)	GIS/mapping: Desktop	No	Yes	Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Windows	4	Local	With plugin
OpenHeatMap	GIS/mapping: Web	No	Yes	Browser	1	External server	Yes
OpenLayers	GIS/mapping: Web, Library	No	Yes	Code editor and browser	4	local or external server	Yes
OpenStreetMap	GIS/mapping: Web	No	Yes	Browser or desktops running Java	3	Local or external server	Yes
TimeFlow	Temporal data analysis	No	No	Desktops running Java	1	Local	No
IBM Word-Cloud Generator	Word clouds	No	No	Desktops running Java	2	Local	As image
Gephi	Network analysis	No	No	Desktops running Java	4	Local	As image
NodeXL	Network analysis	No	No	Excel 2007 and 2010 on Windows	4	Local	As image

Thursday, February 23, 2012

The Open Data Movement

by visually.

NYTimes.com: The Age of Big Data

NEWS ANALYSIS

From: The Age of Big Data

By STEVE LOHR

Published: February 11, 2012

REPRINTS

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Enlarge This Image

Chad Hagen

Multimedia

Graphic

Play (Data-Driven) Ball!

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Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

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Sunday, February 19, 2012

O'Reilly: The bond between data and journalism grows stronger

From O'Reilly radar: The bond between data and journalism grows stronger

Liliana Bounegru discusses the state of data journalism and its growing influence.

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | +Alex Howard | Comments: 3 | 14 February 2012

While reporters and editors have been the traditional vectors for information gathering and dissemination, the flattened information environment of 2012 now has news breaking first online, not on the newsdesk.

That doesn't mean that the integrated media organizations of today don't play a crucial role. Far from it. In the information age, journalists are needed more than ever to curate, verify, analyze and synthesize the wash of data.

To learn more about the shifting world of data journalism, I interviewed Liliana Bounegru (@bb_liliana ), project coordinator of SYNC3 , the first international Data Journalism Awards , and Data Driven Journalism at the European Journalism Centre.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Open Knowledge Foundation announcing the School of Data

February 8, 2012 in News, School of Data

The following post is by Rufus Pollock, Director and Co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Philip Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University.

Today, we’re announcing plans for a School of Data. The School will be a joint venture between theOpen Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). We also welcome other organizations who would like to participate — see below for more on this.

Why?

Data (open or otherwise) needs to be used, and to use data effectively requires certain skills.¹

The explosive growth in data, especially open data, in recent years has meant that the demand for data skills — for data “wranglers”² or “scientists” — has been growing rapidly. Moreover, these skills aren’t just important for banks, supermarkets or the next silicon valley start-up, they are also going to be cruicial in reserach, in journalism, and in civil society organizations (CSOs).

However, there is currently a significant shortfall of data “wranglers” to satisfy this growing demand, especially in civil society organisations — McKinsey expects a skills shortage in data expertise to reach 50-60% by 2018 in the US alone.³

Most formal training for data skills still takes place as part of formal statistics or mathematics programmes. It will be years before data specialist degree paths become broadly available and accepted, and even then, time-intensive degree courses may not be the right option for journalists, activists, or computer programmers who just need to add data skills to their existing expertise.

What is needed are flexible, on-demand, shorter learning options for people who are actively working in areas that benefit from data skills, particularly those who may have already left formal education programmes.

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