Create Your Own Infographic: Visualisation Tools
We’ve been off searching the internet for the best visualisation tools to display your data. Here’s what we found:
Wordle
Wordle is a simple tag cloud generator, where the size of the word is determined by the frequency of the word appearing in the text you supply. It’s simple to use, with lots of functionality including the option of pasting in text, pulling information from a Delicious username or a feed URL in either ATOM or RSS formats.
The level of customisation is what makes Wordle such a great free tool. You can change the font, colour and design, and are even able to remove superfluous words by right-clicking. You also have the option to input words by frequency via the ‘Advanced’ section of the site.
Below is the Wordle visualisation created from Google’s Gmail Blog:
It’s a very simple tool, and does exactly what you want it to.
Microsoft Pivot
Using the power of Silverlight, which was launched as a competitor to Flash, Microsoft Pivot displays data in the form of beautifully presented tables. Designed to help users interact with massive amounts of visual data, Pivot compiles everything into ‘Collections’, combining similar items on the internet. Of these, you can then select sections of data and view the relationships between individual pieces of information.
It looks pretty cool, and is best explained by watching the following video from Microsoft:
The service is not available on OS X, and has specific system requirements for both Windows 7 and Vista so check before you download.
Google Public Data Explorer
Using the Google Chart API and data from a variety of sources including Eurostat and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the web based Public Data Explorer will display graphs and charts in a variety of forms, with options of colours and comparisons.
We’re hoping the data sets are increased to include UK census information as, like every Google application, it is very easy to use.
Google also has a wide range of charts that are available on its Google Code service, which has a whole range of APIs for integration across many of its services.
The Best of the Rest
Google Insights for Search: here you can compare search terms from across the world, all displayed in a nice graph.
Twitscoop: a tool for monitoring what is happening on Twitter. Contains the most recent trending topics and a graph of tweet volume over time.
Hootsuite: a desktop dashboard for Twitter with a built-in click counter that display your clicks from its URL shorteners, hoot.ly and ow.ly
TweetStats: just put in your Twitter username (no authorisation required) and you get a whole range of graphs showcasing your tweets.
What tools do you use to visualise your data? Do you think we have missed anything out? Add your comments below.
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Tom Malkin
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