"data visualizations" entries

Data APIs, design, and visual storytelling

One example of how using a data API can lead to better visualizations.

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Over the past five years, international agencies such as the World Bank, OECD, and UNESCO have created portals to make their data available for everyone to explore. Many non-profits are also visualizing masses of data in the hope that it will give policymakers, funders, and the general public a better understanding of the issues they are trying to solve.

Data visualization plays a key role in telling the stories behind the data. For most audiences, data sets are hard to use and interpret — the average user will need a technical guide just to navigate through the complicated hierarchies of categories let alone interpret the information. But data visualizations trigger interest and insight because they are immediate, clear, and tangible.

At FFunction, we visualize a lot of data. Most of the time our clients send us Excel spreadsheets or CSV files, so we were happily surprised when we started to work with UNESCO Institute for Statistics on two fascinating education-related projects — Out-of-School Children and Left Behind — and realized that they had been working on a data API. As we began to work through the data ourselves, we uncovered several reasons why using an API helps immeasurably with data visualization. Read more…