chael.christopher comments on the entries submitted to the Hubway Data Visualization Challenge
I’m out of my league.
I’ve seen two submissions for the data challenge already, and yah, some people are really good. For the rest of who model data and try to create a narrative out of data on a daily basis, a very discrete data set with a very precise way of looking at it is a luxury. Usually we work with a user population who thinks “I want a dashboard, but I don’t know what I want…can you build it for me?” Not an issue here…the developers working on this exercise know exactly what they want to see. The Hubway data set lends itself to being mapped, and while there are a lot of ways to do this, this submission by Russell Goldenberg is very creative. It can be downloaded as an .app or as an .exe — or previewed.
Then there’s this Neo4j graph database version by Max De Marzi. I like how the width of the station corresponds to its traffic.
These aren’t dashboards, these are visualizations. Appealing — yes — but very specific, and custom coded. I have to keep that in mind, because working with business intelligence tools means that I am often trying to spice up relatively unexciting data. But MicroStrategy 9.3 and the features added to Visual Insight (as well as the Report Services widget) means that I at least have something to work with now in terms of network maps. The three layout options are as follows:
- force-directed
- circular
- linear
Keywords: Data Visualization Challenge • graph visualization • hubway