Datavisualization.ch » LineChart

Highcharts, Impressive Javascript Library

Benjamin Wiederkehr — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:01:22 +0000

Torstein Hønsi from Vevstein Web has created a really impressive Javascript charting library. Highcharts allows a developer to easily include interactive charts in websites and webapplications. It currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

The graphics are rendered using the Canvas tag or occasionally SVG & VML. The supported browsers are Safari, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer+ and it also runs great on the iPhone. The default skin for the visualizations does quite a good job regarding readybility and clarity. Unfortunately there are some Powerpoint-esque skins as well (please, just cut them out). One really nice feature is the zoomable timeseries, which I haven’t seen before in any Javascript library.

The library is free to use for non-commercial applications and there are commercial licenses as well. I look foreward to see some real-life examples of it but the Demo Gallery looks good so far.

Google: Zeitgeist 2009

Benjamin Wiederkehr — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:00:03 +0000

The year 2009 comes to an end and a lot, really a lot of queries have been gone through the google search box. The kind folks at Google take a look back at the happenings throughout this year. They do this as anyone would expect them to: collecting data!

Google Zeitgeist are a set of lists ranking keywords by popularity from 1 to 10. Fastest rising and fasted falling are collections of keywords with big differences from 2008 to 2009. Right now there’s only the data as written text, but this could quickly be transformed into a visualization.

To compile the 2009 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.”

So get your tools ready and why not surprize us with your vision how this data could be best visualized.

Analysing Jobless Rate with Moving Graph and Adapting Grid

Benjamin Wiederkehr — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:45:06 +0000

The Interactives Team from the New York Times did it again: Shan carter, Amanda Cox and Kevin Quealy created an interactive infographic analysing the unemployment rate in the USA over the past 33 months. The Flash based application lets the user filter the data by race, gender, age and education level. Once you start to play with the visualization it becomes obvious that we have to be cautious when talking about this topic. The rate varies a lot depending on those factors.

To clearly illustrate the differences, the graph doesn’t simply gets highlighted. Instead the selected graph moves and changes its shape, thus making it easier to see the actuall movement. If a curve with abnormal values, higher or lower than the majority, is selected the grid adapts and scales down or up.

Excellent piece of work on the interaction model as well as on the visual aesthetics.