Coding Free Visualisation

Coding Free Visualisation - WOW!

Today I stumbled across some similar tools that really help with visualisation. They take the approach that you start drawing and then attach attributes of your drawing to data (typically an uploaded .csv file).

To get an idea of the field, Adobe have Project Lincoln, which is fun to watch, but with Adobe products I often discount them because they aren't cheap and readily available as a teaching resource. The video has lots of whooping, but shows the concept well.

The tool that has blown my socks off is Charticulator because I was able to upload .csv of trees that contains lat/long information and make this. Not only can you "see" the line of trees along University Road, the trees are coloured according to species and the heights are mapped to the heights in the data.

Still a novice with the tool, I wondered how I might create a key, so I created a new visualisation that mapped the Y value to species and the X value to maturity of the tree and the height to height, and got this, which turned out to be an interesting visualisation in its own right, revealing different aspects about the distribution of age ranges of trees.

Other tools in a similar vein, but with which I had less success, but to be fair, I haven't spent much time with were:

Data Illustrator

...and...

Data Driven Guides. Here's an article about it and here is the tool (beta I believe)

Conclusion

All of these tools have the same concept behind them, and after minutes of testing they all look worthy of deeper exploration. I'd recommend you watch the introductory videos, they're short and explain how to get started. I tried without the videos intros and failed to make anything useful.

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