Visualization Tools, Generators and Toolkits.
- IBM Many Eyes (tool/wizard for producing online visualizations)
- Google Charts API (e.g. pie chart example) and Google’s Code Playground sandbox
- Prefuse & Flare (code libraries for producing visualizations in Java and AS3)
- Paper.js, Raphael, Protovis & D3, TheJit (Javascript visualization libraries)
- Mechanical Turk (tool for organizing low-cost human data labor)
- OpenPaths (tool for collecting your GPS wanderings)
Tools for the Quantified Self.
There are a ton of tools for helping people keep track of data about themselves.
- Ian Li runs a workshop on this at CHI every year; he has collected examples like: WattVision, for your energy usage; DrinkingDiary, for your alcohol intake; Bedposted, for your sex; RunKeeper, for your running paths; and LastGraph, for your music, etc.
- PersonalInformatics
- Fitbit
- Quantified Self
- IOGraph
(Check out how Stephen Wolfram collects his data, or how Nicholas Felton visualizes his.)
API’s
Seems like everyone has an API these days. Great!
This week, we’ll get our feet wet using Processing with the following:
- Twitter (in Processing)
- More API’s
- The New York Times
- Echonest
- & plus, some slit scanning and image averaging.
But there are many, many others. Apigee.com provides an interface to an enormous list!
Links to Processing projects for these API’s will appear here shortly.
Raw Data Sets.
There’s no shortage of data. Insight, on the other hand…
There are many sites like the following, where you can find table after table of information.
- Google Public Data
- NationMaster (contains many interesting statistics, by country)
- Pachube (clearinghouse for live data streams, from sensors etc., with an API)
- InfoChimps
- The Data Hub
- DataWrangling
- Kevin Chai’s List
- KDNuggets
- Face databases
Not all of these datasets are super-juicy. But if you’ve got a good sense for poking around, you might come across something interesting, like
You might also get a lot of value from “data scraping tools“, like
- Outwit among many others
& yet another thing which could be helpful is
Data Logging Apps.
Consider the following iPhone/Android app utilities, for their ability to record and annotate the world around us:
- Counter+: a simple counter (push a button to increase/decrease)
- Pin Drop: location bookmarking
- myTracks, Location Tracking GPS Lite, GPS Tracks: GPS track logging
- TimeLogger (by CostmoSoft): time logger with .csv export
- Image to Text – OCR (by Ricoh Innovations): capture text in the environment, email it.
- Word Lens (by Quest Visual): translate words (in the camera) from other languages
- Daily Tracker (for personal stats)
- 3G Mapper: maps 3G strength
- What the Font (by Bitstream): identifies fonts in-situ
- Light Meter Free (by Clomputing): indicates light levels
- Sound Level Meter (by Cateater): indicates sound levels
- Color RGB Meter (by Yali Zhu): provides colors of things
- Beat Control – Auto BPM Counter: measures musical BPM from mic/tap
- Tuner!! (by Peter Deelstra): gives pitch measurement for tones
- IP Address Logger: records your IP address
- Sensor Data Logger (Android only): Logs data from all available sensors
- Remember: photos are geotagged by default (GPS info stored in EXIF data).