30 Great Visualization Resources in 30 Days
By Ken Hilburn
July 6, 2010
Find more about:
visualization,
tufte,
tools,
charts,
infoviz
A lot of the applications that Juice creates are designed to make information more accessible to people who wouldn't consider themselves to be data experts. They realize the value in the data that they have, and in many cases they have some sort of analytics solution in place, but they know they're not getting as much value from their data as they should.
One of the hurdles we frequently come up against is that people who aren't actively participating in the visualization discussion don't know what's possible. All they've ever seen, in many cases, are the confusing dashboards, charts, and graphs that are all too prevalent from the vendors in our space. You know the ones: a thick layer of technology slathered with some gloss and wiggle, between two slices of "do it yourself".
In many cases, we find ourselves closing this gap by referring to some of the best examples of work out there. As we were thinking about this, the idea to provide a simple walk through of these examples came into being. The result: a 30 day calendar chocked full of some of the best samples of skills enhancing examples we could find.

Each day is a bite sized chunk and takes only a few minutes to watch, read, do, or play. Some of the days are comprised of Juice content, but most days are from other sources that we've found useful.
You can download it to use yourself, or to share with your friends who need to expand their info-viz horizons. Either way, we think it'll get your creative juices flowing.





8 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown
oli said:
I'd love to learn more on this subject but I am having trouble. None of the URLs work. Is it just me?
Thx
Oli
Jack Lucky said:
Thanks for making this lesson. lvu it.
Week 1 day 4: is paid content (can you please have a look in to it)
Ken said:
@Jack Lucky: Bummer. This is new... and annoying. You can (as I'm sure you've already considered) register for a free 14 day trial to see the article (no credit card required), but I can certainly understand the hesitation to do so.
To help you better decide if it's worth enduring the registration process, here is a summary of the article:
It starts with a discussion of factors driving Martin Wattenburg's 1998 creation of the treemap (one of our favorite visualizations - in Zach's mind, there's a treemap hidden in _every_ data set... somewhere). It then continues on by discussing other advanced visualizations such as presidential word clouds, Wikipedia change timelines (the only image shown), and infographics. It concludes with a discussion of how the brain is better at processing visual information.
It's a who's who list of information visualizations ground breakers such as Wattenburg, Viegas, Tufte, NYT, and Tableau. It's one report in a nine report series including "Data, data everywhere", "Needle in a haystack", and "Handling the cornucopia." Keep in mind however, that it shows only one image of the many examples that it discussions - sort of ironic, huh?
We apologize for the required registration reference, but hopefully this will help.
Chris said:
Thanks for putting this together, nicely done. Just curious, do you have any other examples of guides that use a similar format? I posted the link and wrote a couple of paragraphs about it on my blog at http://freshspectrum.com
paresh said:
Apart from spreading this to people who are already initiated into the world of data visualization, guys reading the data visualization blogs, we should also spread it to others who may only be peripherally aware of this field. Doing my bit - spreading it among finance and accounting professionals [Linkedin Group].
Ken said:
@Paresh - Yes! Thanks for helping others "see."
Nemo said:
Thanks, but why are you giving URLs in a PDF document and not a simple web page ? (pdf viewers are not web browsers, and your links in Acrobat reader on my Mac are not clikables !).
James said:
and for some tardy responses,
@Chris - Glad you found it helpful for you and your readers. I'm curious myself if there are other materials presented this way! If you find any, do share. It was simply my effort in always reevaluating how we present information.
@Nemo - The links should be working on the latest version of Adobe Reader (9.3.3) from www.adobe.com
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