1. #CASEprog Data Engagement:
Visualisation Tools
Tony Hirst
Dept of Communication & Systems
The Open University

2. http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/corporate/pdf/1318351.pdf

3. From: DCLG DataViz Report

4. From: DCLG DataViz Report

5. http://www.improving-visualisation.org/

6. My Assumptions
• Your end users are developing policy
• You have data that might help
• There are case histories available
demonstrating how visualisation techniques
can help make sense of data in a way that
relates to policy questions

7. The goal?
- to provide access to visualisation
techniques to promote your data and
provide a way for end users to engage with it

8. “…there’s a false expectation that visualising data
is easy. The JFDI attitude prevalent in other areas
of digital tools for local government may have
created false expectations on ease of access to
visualisation.”

9. “Cut-and-paste” chart templates

10. IBM Many Eyes
Embeddable 
Interactive 

11. Embeddable 
Interactive 

13. Google Fusion Table
powered maps

14. Timemaps

17. “Data
Liberation”
(Data as such…)

18. “Import * +
Excel/XLS
CSV
Google Spreadsheet
from URL”

20. Google Refine

21. (Data Cleansing in
Google Refine)

22. Not quite ready yet…

23. Wizard for creating Google
spreadsheet powered databases

24. Online interface to R/ggplot2

25. ggplot() +
geom_linerange(data = d1,aes(x= car, ymin = ymin,ymax = ymax)) +
geom_point(data = d2,aes(x= car, y= value,shape = variable),size = 2) +
opts(title="F1 2011 Korea nRace Summary Chart",
axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=-90, hjust=0)) +
labs(x = NULL, y = "Position", shape = "")

27. [ Rstudio ]

28. [ Rstudio ]

29. Google Visualisation API/Chart Tools

34. Scraper
View

35. An in-browser
data context

38. .5 distinctions

39. Exploratory Visualisation
Vs.
Presentation Graphics

41. “Infographic generators”

42. sort
filter
facet
group by/aggregate
join/merge

43. FILTER
SORT
FACET
Google Visualisation API/Chart Tool Components

44. Filter
Sort

45. Nested Group-By Optional grouping calculations
Google Fusion Tables – Aggregate View

46. Group by  Hierarchy inside

47. Data
Format
Datasets
Datasets
Data Views
Data Views
Data Renderings
Data Data Renderings
Representation
 Data Shape & Structure 

48. Platonic
solids

49. -Tabular data
-(Geo)spatial data
-Temporal data
-Network data
-Hierarachical data

52. ANY QUESTIONS???
Tony Hirst
@psychemedia
blog.ouseful.info