Leveraging Visualizations: US States, Capitals, & More

Emerging cloud computing and software-as-a-service platforms, along with open data and readily accessible APIs, is facilitating the creation of mash-ups by folks at all experience levels. To illustrate the ready access to such resources, I’ve created some examples that require no more than familiarity with spreadsheets and copy & paste. These examples are also intended to motivate conversations on interesting ways these and other visualizations could be leveraged to convey information on relatively unadorned sites, such as FedBizOpps.

The first example leverages BatchGeo, the team behind Maptive, which is built on top of the Google Maps service. To access the interactive features of this map of U.S. states & capitals, click the image, which is simply a Google Static Maps image. Data was drawn from this and other Wikipedia pages to populate the pop-up info, which provides ready access the capitals of each US State, as well as GDP, population, governor, an image of the state flag, and other key information. Clicking a pin in the bottom black area will filter and zoom by that year group and the view can be reset by clicking in the black area outside the markers.

A different visualization of this same data set was created by uploading the data to the ManyEyes service, hosted by the folks behind IBM’s Cognos software. In this instance, the multiple chloropleth visualizations color codes the area of each state by a scaled coloring based on the value of that corresponding data. The “colorful” chloropeth in the lower right, denoting state capitals, is included to simplifyy picking a specific state to highlight across all maps. The other interactive visualization pointed to in the table below uses this same state information to build scatterplots along three dimensions: x, y, and circle area. A natural extension would be to add color as a fourth dimension, but that extension might border on information overload. However, the state name will pop-up when hovering in interactive mode.

Other visualizations, such as a video-like moving timeline, can be created using Google’s Fusion Tables service. A variant of the US Capital data to experiment with Google’s service is located here, and demonstrated here using scatter plots. One caveat is that although Google’s service can import from Google Docs or files, such as CSV or Microsoft Excel (xlsx), there does not [yet?] appear to be a copy/paste capability equivalent to BatchGeo, ManyEyes or other platforms.

Of course, this post only scratches the surface of what visualization and data mash-ups are readily accessible, or might be integrated with proprietary solutions. Interested readers should also peruse this post from Smashing Magazine and watch this awesome video by Hans Rosling. Another interesting visualization is this elastic lists demo for performing faceted search or this interesting search of Amazon, called Amaztype, at least for short search phrases. Future posts will explore additional visualizations in various contexts related to social media, such as described in my recent presentation slides (pdf) at Infotec and open data, such as Factual.

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