Archive for the 'Data Sharing' Category

Word Play

August 15th, 2008

The other day I happened to come across a nifty new feature on the data sharing site “Many Eyes” called “Wordles”. As you may know from my last post, I’ve already written about Many Eyes before (here and here) as well as another data sharing site, Swivel, here.

But Wordles are something new: highly customizable tag clouds. Many Eyes already has tag cloud functionality, of course; I was an especially big fan of their tag cloud comparsion tool. But tag clouds don’t have the best reputation. Some people outright hate them. And the people at Many …

Geography Lesson

August 1st, 2008

Geography was not my strong suit in school; it required lots of memorization about a lot of faraway places I’d never been to in the 6th grade. To make matters worse, geographical names for countries and cities change all the time. Seemed kind of silly to my pre-teen self.

At some level, though, I realized the utility in it. I undertook to learn what I could, which was usually just their names along with some other odd fact here and there (”Burma’s main export is jute”, etc.). Some years later, in college, I found out much more …

Eyes on the Prize, Part Two

April 18th, 2008

(This week is the second of a two-part post on the data-sharing site “Many Eyes”. If you haven’t, you should definitely read part one (about the site’s visualizations) first. This week, by contrast, is going to be about the specifics of those visualizations and the datasets I uploaded.

This two-part post is also the third in a series on data-sharing websites. Here are parts one and two of that series.)

Now that you understand a bit more about the (many) types of data visualizations Many Eyes has to offer, we’ll get into them more in-depth and discuss the process of uploading …

Eyes on the Prize, Part One

April 11th, 2008

(This week is the first of a two-part post on the data sharing site “Many Eyes”. It was such a big site with so much content that I had to break this post into two parts to make it manageable. In part one, I’ll cover general trends with an overview. In part two, I’ll upload a couple of datasets to talk about, and describe more specific findings.

This post is also the third in a series on data-sharing websites. Here are parts one and two of that series.)

“Many Eyes” is a data-sharing and visualization website, a result …

I Swivel Data

March 28th, 2008

(This post is the second in a three-part series on data-sharing websites. Part one is here.)

I’d heard of the data-sharing site Swivel some time ago. When I first went there, there weren’t a lot of datasets uploaded, so there wasn’t much to look at. The site was in a pretty rough-and-ready state, too. So I figured I’d just check back later, and some months later, I did just that, leading to this write-up.

Swivel is a website started in December 2005 by two physics majors named Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy. They call themselves “data nerds”, a …

Mind the Gap

March 21st, 2008

(This post is the first in a three-part series on data sharing websites. However, I reserve the right to add more parts should I come across more worthy pages.)

While doing research on new data sources, I came across an excellent site I hadn’t heard of before called Gapminder. I suspect the name is a play on the classic British Underground slogan, “Mind the Gap”, but I can’t be sure, especially since the site is run by a Swede named Hans Rosling (who apparently is a sword swallower in his spare time - try saying “Swede sword swallower” five …