Apps
12 posts
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,...
Picular is a simple tool that lets you search for a topic, and with Google Images as source, outputs a set of colors related to your query. This is going to be a great timesaver. Tags: color, search
Map-making is a tricky business with many variables to consider that can directly change how someone interprets the land and people in a location. The Cartography Playground is a simple site to test these variables interactively. Learn about algorithms, mess with appearance, and toggle through representations. Tags: algorithms, cartography
The colors you choose to visualize data can completely shift what you convey to a reader. With an ominous color palette, a graphic meant to be light and fun comes off the wrong way. Or the other way around. You wouldn’t use Comic Sans for your résumé (right…?), so choose colors that fit the topic. Viz Palette, made by Elijah Meeks and Susie Lu, aims to make the choosing part...
Picking colors is one my favorite things to do with visualization when I’m not in a rush for time. But when I can spare the minutes to pick and choose, it’s useful to have a quick reference. ColorBrewer is the go-to, but CARTOColors is a simpler take. It just shows you a bunch of schemes at once for sequential, diverging, and qualitative data. [via @maartenzam] Tags: color
When you first get a CSV file, sometimes it’s useful to poke at it a bit to see what’s there. Sometimes you need to restructure the data or sort it in some non-straightforward way. Tad is a lightweight desktop application that helps with this early stage of data gathering, “designed to fit in to the workflow of data engineers and data scientists.” It’s free and open source. I played around...
Some say annotation is the most important layer for charts meant for public consumption. It directs readers where to look and what’s important. But the process is not always straightforward. ChartAccent is an application slash research project that aims to make annotation easier. Plug in some data, make a chart, and do some clicking and dragging. Done. Tags: annotation
Default color schemes are often horrible, but spending a lot of time putting together color schemes when you don’t have a lot of minutes is also horrible. I Want Hue by Mathieu Jacomy at the Sciences-Po Medialab lets you set a few options, and it spits out a palette for your visualization. Tags: color
Map making is a finicky challenge where oftentimes your map data — points, lines, and polygons — must align just right with your external data that exists as a CSV file or related. Mapshaper is an online tool that helps you massage your geographic data to where it needs to be. The online application has been around for a while, but I only recently used it, and it’s kind of...