Word map based on johnmason.me
It’s been a while since I’ve had a look to see what visualisation techniques are out there – possibly because had nothing that interesting to visualise. However, looking at my dive log the other day I thought it could do with a more intuitive way of analysing the data – in the form of a treemap or similarly visual experience.
Two quick, and free, methods out there are the Many Eyes visualisation service from IBM and the use of R – the free statistical modeling language. Playing with Many Eyes is extremely easy – once you’ve registered. The only drawback is that once you’ve uploaded your data set it’s public. So don’t include any personal or private details! So, here’s a sample created with Many Eyes which shows the dives I’ve done by Country, location and dive site where the size of the boxes represent the time I was underwater and the colour indicates the max depth.
Now, what about R? There’s a great tutorial on the flowingdata.com website about using R – an offline statistical package. Ultimately, you have more control over every aspect of the analysis but it will take you a lot longer to familiarise yourself with the functions – and the command line interface. Here’s an example using the same dataset as the Many Eyes example above. The IBM tool clearly has the edge for quick analysis but is limited with regards to data handling (i.e. only public datasets).
