Apps
20 posts
When we visualize data to communicate to others, we must consider what others see through their eyes. Sim Daltonism by Michel Fortin is a free app for the Mac that lets you see how those with various types of color blindness perceive what’s on your computer screen. It’s simple to use. Just drag a window over any part of your screen to see the differences. Tags: colorblind
Companies are tracking what you do online. You know this. But it can be a challenge to know the extent, because the methods are hidden on purpose. So The Markup built Blacklight: To investigate the pervasiveness of online tracking, The Markup spent 18 months building a one-of-a-kind free public tool that can be used to inspect websites for potential privacy violations in real time. Blacklight reveals the trackers loading on...
Maddy Varner reporting for The Markup: “All protesting and all marches are a series of balancing acts of different priorities and acceptable risks,” said Mason Donahue, a member of Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based group of technologists and activists that run digital security training classes and have investigated the Chicago Police Department’s use of surveillance technology. “There is a lot of communication ability that goes away if you don’t bring...
Brian Foo is the current Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. His latest project is Citizen DJ, which lets you explore and remix audio from the Library: It invites the public to make hip hop music using the Library’s public audio and moving image collections. By embedding these materials in hip hop music, listeners can discover items in the Library’s vast collections that they likely would never have known existed....
Botnet is a social media app where you’re the only human among a million bots trained on social media activity. Post pictures, status updates, or whatever else you want. Then let the likes and weird comments roll in. You can even purchase troll bots, bots that tell dad jokes, and more bots. Social media is on its way to mostly being bots anyways. Might as well jumpstart the future. Artificial...
Color scheme selections are nice and all, but they’re even better when viewed in context. It’s part of ColorBrewer’s charm, in the context of maps. Happy Hues offers color schemes in the context of a web page. A combination of this plus Viz Palette would be killer. Tags: color
Datawrapper, a focused web tool that makes online charts easier to put together and share, changed their pricing structure. There used to be a couple of paid tiers for individuals and small teams, but now you get more for free. And even though it’s free: We won’t sell your data. Some companies make the user into the product, but this is not our business model. All data you upload to...
A few years ago, The New York Times asked readers to guess a trend line before showing the actual data. It forced readers to test their own beliefs against reality. TheyDrawIt from the MU Collective is a tool that lets you make similar prediction charts: These line graphs encourage readers to reflect on their own beliefs by predicting the data before seeing it. Only after they draw a prediction does...
FastCharts is the public version of the Financial Times’ in-house solution for making charts, uh, fast. Load some data. Get the chart fast. FastCharts. Kachow. Tags: Financial Times
TwoTone, by Datavized and supported by the Google News Initiative, is a straightforward tool to sonify a dataset. Upload your data, select the metric, speed, and instrument, and you get a tune output. If you thought visualization was tricky perceptually, then you’re in for a treat with sonification. The two most useful examples I can think of off-hand were event-based, so maybe start with something like that. Tags: Datavized, Google,...