This weekend I will help lead a workshop on data visualization at the yearly meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Flagstaff, Arizona. We’re going to show some quick and dirty tricks for visualizing data. In the workshop, we’ll use the same dataset that I used to make this visualization:
I learned the “tricks” I needed to make this map over a few month period, mostly by googling how to make such maps and also using a template that a friend gave me. In the tutorial I’m working on, I’ll provide you a template for a map like this one so that you can make it in a day instead of a few months. All you’ll have to do is put your data in the same format.
I’d like to emphasize, though, that although this graphic was fairly popular, I’m not particularly happy with it, largely because it does not sufficiently tell the story that I wanted to tell. More on that in another post.
UPDATE: I’m not going to show a template for how to make the timeline at the NASW meeting — I’ll just how to make it so that you can click and unclick markers.