Get yer graph on
Posted on | January 2, 2009 |
Journalists and fiction writers alike often need access to data about all sorts of stuff. Writing a story about how consumer confidence and home prices just nosedived? Might be handy to be able to correlate the two together, over a 20-year history. Maybe you might want to check them against historical employment data. Or the price of food, or the national average per-kilowatt hour price for electricity. You can not only give context to a story by running the numbers, but can sometimes find patterns that could lead you to ask unusual questions.
Not only is it sometimes difficult to know where to find these different data sets, but they are also sometimes difficult to digest. That’s why we like graphs, and the numbers that feed ‘em.
There are a growing number of sites that not only give you access to the data, but also give you the chance to visualise it in unique ways (or do it for you). Infochimps, which is in pre-launch mode, focuses on getting the data up. The organisers are looking for large datasets about pretty much anything (as long as it’s interesting), and then want to hook them together so that you can begin correlating data sets. The wonderful statistigeeks that started the site sum it up perfectly in their FAQ:
Study the physics of baseball by comparing the hourly weather during every single baseball game to game outcomes. Uncover political campaign irregularities by comparing neighborhood per-capita income, historical voter trends, and public campaign finance records. Plan real-estate decisions based on what news-and-other-media keywords rank highly in each area.
There are already hundreds of data sets on the site available for download in common formats like CSV, leaving the user to crunch the numbers as they see fit. You can browse by field and tag, too.
Infochimps points to other sites, including Swivel, which lets users upload data and make graphs from it. They have to cite the data source, so that you can check it’s legit. The service had 13628 data sets at the time of writing and counting. Just looking at the most recent tables is stimulating. You can also blog the data, too. That’s a useful way to bring something a little extra to your to online writing. Here’s that 20 year consumer confidence history, tracked against home pricing data:
Numbrary has a searchable database of stats that it’ll display in graph form, complete with linked sources. And IBM has Many Eyes, which lets you upload, share, and graph your own data.
Even Amazon’s at it, having just launched its public data sets service on Amazon Web Services. This is more for developers, though.
If you’re into statistics (and you should be, if you’re a non-fiction writer, as they can help to give your readers a broader historical view of the subject), then these data playgrounds should give you some useful tools.
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Word Herder is a site for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. Surf here to read more about useful tools to help you organise your writing and optimise your research. I'm Danny Bradbury and I'm a freelance technology writer writing for the Guardian , the Financial Times, the National Post, Backbone magazine, MSN Canada, and the trade press. Here's a feed showing some of my work.
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April 17th, 2009 @ 9:48 am
Love the real estate graphs!