Alex Gamela - Digital Media & Journalism » test

#MAProject: Visualization experiment with Portugal’s Expenses and Jit

Alex Gamela — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:50:26 +0000

So the deadline is approaching fast to deliver my final assignment and finally finish my MA. I’ve been trying out lots of different types of visualizations, especially under the guidance of Nathan Yau’s Visualize This, which I recommend because it has a great practical side to understand data visualizations and how to start building them.

I have been taking a self inflicted crash course on Excel, Google Refine, JSON, ScraperWiki and Java, not to mention R, Protovis, Processing and other assorted tools, trying not to build readable charts but also making the interactive without resorting to Flash. During my quest for interactive tools I rediscovered Jit, which can be a great starting point to have interesting types of data visualization.

In this specific situation I used data referring the executive expenses of the Portuguese Government in the first half of this year, and worked around the Sunburst model available on Jit. I had to work two different levels of data with JSON to get these two dependent rings. Ia also thought about doing it as a Treemap, but this seemed to be more clear. It’s still a mockup but you’ll get the idea (hopefully).

Click on the image to check the vis and let me hear from you.

Video – Kiosk Diaries

Alex Gamela — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:04:56 +0000

I had to try out my new gear and I asked a few questions to Pedro Silva, the owner of a newsstand in one of the most typical squares in my city and author of the blog Diário de um Quiosque (Kiosk Diaries, in a loose translation), where he writes about media, it’s costumers and news.

There’s some wind in the audio and I realized I lack a few wide shots, butI was just taking the camera and the audio recorder for a spin. Need to do it more often.

I also used universalsubtitles.org to create some subtitles in English, and I liked this tool a lot. Worth checking out.

Well, take a look and if you have any suggestions, ideas, evil remarks, be my guest.

Map test: Aeroplane crashes in Portugal this year | Teste: Mapa das aeronaves que caíram em Portugal este ano

Alex Gamela — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:01:02 +0000

data taken from here | dados retirados daqui

This weekend i wanted to see how easy it would be to create a map using a spreadsheet. From the options i had i used Mapspread, which allows you to upload a .CSV file to generate a map in a matter of seconds. The main advantage is that Mapspread uses the location available in the spreadsheet, and places all the information in the right place by itself.

First i created the spreadsheet, the most time consuming part of the process, then just uploaded it, costumized, and voilá, map generated.

This map is about small aeroplanes that crashed in Portugal this year, and the data fields refer to date, place, injured, deaths, type of aircraft and other informations. It took about 30 minutes to generate it. If you keep a collaborative open spreadsheet in Google Docs, it is quite easy to update your map, using other people’s input.

I still have to sort some details out, but this seems to be a quite practical manner of creating a map out of a spreadsheet.

Do you know any other ways to do this? Share them in the comment box.

Este fim de semana queria ver até que ponto seria fácil criar um mapa usando um ficheiro Excel. Das opções que tinha escolhi o Mapspread,que permite fazer o upload de um ficheiro .CSV para gerar um mapa em segundos. A grande vantagem é que o Mapspread usa a localização disponível na tabela e coloca a informação nos sítios certos autimaticamente.

Primeiro criei a tabela, a parte que me levou mais tempo, depois foi fazer o upload, personalizar, e voilá, temos o mapa criado.

Este mapa refere-se às aeronaves ligeiras que cairam em Portugal este ano, e os campos de dados referem-se à data, local, feridos, mortos, tipo de aeronave e outras informações. Demorei cerca de 30 minutos a criar este mapa. Se tiverem uma tabela aberta à colaboração no Google Docs, é fácil fazer a actualização do mapa, com contribuições dos utilizadores.

Ainda tenho que resolver alguns detalhes, mas esta parece ser uma forma bastante prática de criar um mapa assim.

Conhecem outras formas de fazer isto? Partilhem-nas connosco nos comentários.

The Spreadsheet | A Tabela