The graphics desk at The New York Times gets high praise amongst journalists and visual information specialists for their clear, clean and often creative graphics that explain and enhance news.
Among the team is the group’s resident statistician, Amanda Cox, who’s been hailed as the “queen of infographics” and has been responsible for some of the high concept pieces published by NYT.
Any time you can hear Amanda speak or learn from her, you should. At the Eyeo Festival in June, she looked at the evolution of data graphics, particularly within the history of the Times graphics department.
Want to learn more? Kevin Quealy, Amanda’s coworker, posts fantastic explanations of how she and other members of the graphics desk do some of its work. Follow along on Charts’n’Things.
One of the most popular posts on Ricochet was the collection of dataviz tools, slides and links from last year’s NICAR conference.
It was so popular, in fact, that people have asked me to make a similar collection again. So from Feb. 23–26, I’ll be updating this post with all the great things NICARians have to share this year.
Follow #NICAR12 on Twitter for the buzz; come to this page for the goods. And if you’re attending the conference, be sure to buy a T-shirt to support IRE, the organization that puts this fantastic event together. Ben Welsh of The Los Angeles Times is taking candid photos and posting them on Flickr.
Have links from sessions you attended? Post them in comments or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva and I’ll add them to this list.
• Twazzup – find breaking news, popular hashtags, influential users
• Reporters’ Lab Reviews – a link list of tools, techniques and research for public affairs reporting
• Twellow – a yellow pages for Twitter
• Twiangulate – find sources and groups of people on Twitter
• Crowdbooster – monitor and analyze buzz on social media sites
• KnowEm Username Search – finds the social networks a person or organization/brand is using
• Muckrack Pro – add yourself to the list of journalists or find journalists covering a particular topic
• The Archivist – save tweets and export to Excel to analyze later
• PowerPivot for Excel – “Load massive amounts of data from virtually any source, process in seconds and model with powerful analytical capabilities”
• Pandoc – a universal document converter
• HTML-to-PDF – converts HTML to PDF docs for free
• Mr. Data Converter – converts Excel data into one of several Web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.
• Natural Language Toolkit – for machine language text analysis
• Voyant Tools – Web-based document analysis
• ClearForest Gnosis – Firefox plugin that uses OpenCalais for data extraction
• Exhibit – a publishing framework for data-rich interactive web pages
• DocumentCloud – store, analyze and annotate PDFs
• DataTables – jQuery plugin to create sortable datasets
• Ben Welsh’s triumvirate of tools that allow you to copy Google Maps’ functionality:
– a data source, like OpenStreetMap
– a tile set, like what you can make with TileMill
– a JavaScript interface, like Leaflet
• OpenOffice – open source office suite software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation/slide deck, database)
• QGIS – Open source geographic information system
• Shape to Fusion (a.k.a. Shpescape) – Import shapefiles to Fusion Tables
• MySQL – Database software
• Google Refine – data cleaner
• Junar – Discover and track data
• The Overview Project
• Visicheck – ensures your graphics are visible to the colorblind
• Colorbrewer – in case you need help with color schemes for your design
• Color Oracle – colorblindness simulator for Mac OS, Windows and Linux
• 0 to 255 – find variations of any color
• Beautiful Soup – useful for many things, including parsing HTML
• Weave – Web-based analysis and visualization environment. Made by a partnership between the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Open Indicators Consortium
• Highcharts – create interactive JavaScript charts (free for non-commercial use)
• Indiemapper – Upload shapefiles and convert them to create static, thematic maps
• CSV-to-JSON converter
• Sinatra a lightweight Ruby/Rails framework for creating apps
• Use Google Docs, XPath and the =importxml() function to put data in a spreadsheet
• PANDA Project
• Timemap syncs a SIMILE timeline to a web-based map
• Tabletop – allows you to use Google spreadsheets as your app backend
• Js2Coffee – converts Javascript to CoffeeScript and back
• CoffeeScript sandbox
• iPL2 – ask a librarian, search through the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) websites.
• “Lesson of the night: Want to put census geos in fusion tables? Keep it stupid simple: convert US Census data from TIGER into shape files with shpescape” — tip from Matt Kiefer
• Rubular – a Ruby regular expression editor
• Timeline Setter – makes timelines from spreadsheets
• Spoofcard changes your voice and gives you a temporary phone number
• Tablechart turns HTML tables into charts
• Spam Mimic – hide a message in spam
• FEC scraper/FEC parser – Chris Schnaars’ script on Github
One of the most popular posts on Ricochet was the collection of dataviz tools, slides and links from