Web2forDev: Web 2.0 for Development Gateway

Thanks to the Internet one has access to a growing pile of data, which leads to a major challenge: presenting such data visually and in an informative way...

Office packages from Microsoft or Open Office are often the first choice but the web does offer some helpful free tools that are easy to handle and with visualizations for texts or figures that go way beyond ordinary desktop applications.

Reading tables full of figures is not only complex, but also time consuming and does not always bring to the fore the most important results at first sight. Visualization tools help here to highlight a certain aspect, show a tendency or offer a different perspective for interpretation. There is a great variety of web-based visualisation tools, which allow you visualize your data as graphs, maps, networks, bubbles and many more diagrams. Here is a selection of prominent tools:

Tag clouds

Wordle  lets you create a tag cloud out of texts easily, showing you the most common words in texts. One example is a tag cloud from the open ICT4D paper by ICRD.

Tagcrowd is another that allows you to upload texts and highlight quite quickly the most common concepts. The clouds can be exported as images and inserted in a website or power point presentation.

Many Eyes. IBM is behind Many Eyes, which offers various options to visualize your texts in a phrase net and tag cloud. A word tree linking a key word to all associated words. There are different visualizations to see relationships among data points, track lows and highs over time, compare a set of values, and see parts of a whole. There is nice bubble chart for the carbon footprint of a Big Mac.  Many Eyes is public, so one can browse in over 30.000 visualizations.

Google Fusion

Google recently released its fusion tables, where you can merge different data sets (tables) of up to 100MB. It is easy to handle through a step by step guide. It prepares the data and tests different visualizations. A nice feature is maps, which already include geo data such as country or city names and addresses that can be automatically displayed on the map. To illustrate the potential, I imported some data from the UNDP human development report  and made this intensity map visualization.

Percentage of population under age fifteen by 2015 (darkest green = 48%).
 

Google Docs

It all can be done even more easily with Google Docs through spreadsheets. So, lets say you have a table full of information imported into Google Docs. Select a certain range of figures, click insert and then click gadgets. Google offers under Gadgets a variety of visualization features. There are also maps for a number of graphs and interactive diagrams. The best thing is that these visualizations do not only stick to the spreadsheet, they can also be published on a public page or even on your own website. For example, FusionCharts is like a widget, which can be placed into your website – and because it is connected to Google spreadsheet it updates automatically all data edited in the spreadsheet.

To go one step further you can set up a survey through Google Docs and send the form or the link to people. Respondents fill out the survey, which will be updated in the spreadsheet. The results are shown in real time through a visualization on your website.

Visualization tools on the web offer a great variety of features. However, as with all freely available tools, it is highly recommended that you read the terms of services especially when you are working with copyrighted data.

To find more about these and other tools, you will find a collection here.  For an excellent place to get started with data, try visiting UN data.

 

Christian Kreutz