Piece de resistance: Data viz wrapup

Posted by on Mar 8, 2010 in Blog, CAR, class, data visualizations, django, projects, tufte | No Comments

And, scene.  That’s a term borrowed from theater, it’s used as an act or scene closes.  My giant Chicago art gallery persistence project is completed.  We’ve got a trend article that uses CAR techniques, and a Flash visualization and a searchable database.  The main thrust to the story is that of the galleries that existed ...

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Persistence of Chicago Art Galleries

Posted by on Mar 3, 2010 in Blog, CAR, class, data visualizations, projects, writing | One Comment

I’ve spent the quarter compiling and analyzing data exploring the persistence of Chicago art galleries, as a way of exploring CAR for the arts.  I found a list from the Chicago Artists’ Coalition of 96 such businesses that existed in 1990, and tracked their fate.  A story summarizing the trend follows (an assignment for my ...

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Django app #2: Conquering forms and Google Maps API

Posted by on Feb 28, 2010 in Blog, class, data visualizations, django, programming | One Comment

It’s been a busy week for the programming journalists — as I’m sure you’ve seen. Congrats to all, especially the dev team at The New York Times, who just released the newest version of the Congress API, with plenty more robust features to play with, as well as my recent Data Delver interviewee Andy Boyle ...

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Data Delver: Lisa Pickoff-White, California Watch

Posted by on Feb 15, 2010 in Blog, class, data delvers, data visualizations | No Comments

While talking to data reporters from around the country, it’s become apparent to me that the best work is done when the staff is supportive.  Some newspapers are doing great work, and some are struggling.  Which led me to wonder how the investigative organizations are doing, new and encouraging experimentation to draw eyes and inform ...

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Visualizing networking: When it doesn’t work

Posted by on Feb 15, 2010 in Blog, class, data visualizations, processing, programming | No Comments

So much in journalism and in life, we strive for perfection in our work. The best story idea, the best presentation.  We strive for perfection as individuals, we compete to be the best, get to the scene before someone else, write tighter, edit faster.  But sometimes, it’s just as important to recognize when something just ...

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Visual confections are more than mere presentation

Posted by on Feb 15, 2010 in Blog, class, data visualizations, theory, tufte | One Comment

Data visualization.  It’s one of those terms that can mean so many things.  I say I’m doing an independent study on data visualization this quarter.  That’s true.  But a better description would be “data visualizations for journalism.”  I’ve talked about this with people before, a lot of pieces are gorgeous, and they do convey information, ...

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Repetition, repetition: The power of multiples

Posted by on Feb 9, 2010 in Blog, class, tufte | No Comments

Teachers are true heroes in today’s society, I owe so much to almost every one that I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. As the daughter of an elementary school teacher, and from teaching some classes on my own, I know that repetition is a key part of passing knowledge from your brain to ...

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Treemapping Gov. Quinn’s State of the State

Posted by on Feb 9, 2010 in Blog, class, data visualizations, processing | No Comments

This week in the Processing book, I learned all about trees and hierarchies. There’s a lot of potential here for allowing the user to delve deeper into interactives by providing multiple layers. This is a very cool example of how programming helps support my theory of journalism — the deeper the information you offer, the ...

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Relating zip codes and geography using Processing

Posted by on Feb 1, 2010 in Blog, class, data visualizations, processing | No Comments

This week I tackled recreating Ben Fry’s Zipdecode project, which he gives great step-by-step instructions for in his Visualizing Data book that I have been following along with this quarter. It’s an interesting take on the concept of the scatterplot, even before using its interactive features, it asserts its usefulness as a population density map. ...

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Parallelism: Packing information into visualization

Posted by on Jan 30, 2010 in Blog, class, data visualizations, tufte | No Comments

Information is fascinating at many different levels. Show me a simple graph of the components that make up a whole, that tells me something. I’ve found almost anything is more interesting when looked at across time, since it adds another dimension. This also helps with analysis, because outliers or rapid changes are often related to ...

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