Data Visualisation Tools by the Guardian Datablog

SOURCE OF ORIGINAL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/data-visualisation-tools-free

Just starting out in visualising your data? Looking for something simple to use? This is where we go

The Wikileaks war logs: every death recorded. Get Bigger versionWhat data visualisation tools are out there on the web that are easy to use - and free? Here on the Datablog and Datastore we try to do as much as possible using the internet's powerful free options.That may sound a little disingenuous, in that we obviously have access to the Guardian's amazing Graphics and interactive teams for those pieces where we have a little more time - such as this map of public spending (created using Adobe Illustrator) or this Twitter riots interactive.

But for our day-to-day work, we often use tools that anyone can - and create graphics that anyone else can too.

So, what do we use?

Grading Follow your Money schemes in the United States

US Public Interest Research Groups have graded the various initiatives that track and record the spending patterns of the states.

Follow you Money 2012 Grading System (story, data, and original "follow your money" websites)

 

 

A technical post on how to get access to the raw data of a Flash site

Having recalled the misery that prevailed my brain when the Hellenic Parliament published the financial audit for all the elected MPs and MEPs back in December 2011 (update: the data is not up anymore. The webpage containing the files and allowing public access remained online for almost two months and then it was taken down) and which on purpose? selected the non-useful Flash file type to present the data, I fell today on the post that I reproduce below. The source i retrieved it from is DataDrivenJournalism.net (an exceptional and really informative site when it comes to data processing and presenting techniques) but Originally published by Dan Nguyen on ProPublica on 30 December 2010 under a Creative Commons license.