Category: Tutorials

  • Getting data from a Google Spreadsheet

    When you’re in need of a way to store data collectively online, you may want a quick and simple way to store, edit and retrieve data, Google Spreadsheets are an easy-to-use choice. Let’s say you create a simple table and don’t want to build a complicated database backend to write, edit and store for your data…

  • Creating a Custom D3 Visualization

    This course barely scratches the surface of what D3 is capable of. A more complicated example will show how you can make custom visualizations with D3 that are impossible with standard charting libraries. This is where D3 really shines. The goal is to make a chart of day lengths throughout the year, like this one drawn…

  • D3 Refresh

    This article aims to give you a high level overview of D3’s capabilities, in each example you’ll be able to see the input data, transformation and the output document. Rather than explaining what every function does I’ll show you the code and you should be able to get a rough understanding of how things work.…

  • Animated Flight Visualization

    So far we’ve only looked at static lifeless graphics with a few rollovers for additional information. Let’s make an animated visualization that shows the active flights over time between Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. See the Pen D3 – scales by Haig Armen (@haigarmen) on CodePen. The SVG document for this type of graphic is…

  • Acquiring, cleaning, and formatting data

    Not so many years ago, data was hard to obtain. Often data journalists would have to painstakingly compile their own datasets from paper records, or make specific requests for electronic databases using freedom of information laws. The Internet has changed the game. While those methods may still be needed, many government databases can now be…

  • Using GitHub

    In this week’s class we will learn the basics of version control, so that you can work on your final projects in a clean folder with a single set of files, but can save snapshots of versions of your work at each point and return to them if necessary. This avoids the hell of having…

  • Graphical Analysis & Exploration

    Introducing Tableau Public In this tutorial we will work with Tableau Public, which allows you to create a wide variety of interactive charts, maps and tables and organize them into dashboards and stories that can be saved to the cloud and embedded on the web. The free Public version of the software requires you to save…

  • Network Analysis with Gephi

    Network analysis with Gephi Today, network analysis is being used to study a wide variety of subjects, from how networks of genes and proteins influence our health to how connections between multinational companies affect the stability of the global economy. Network graphs can also be used to great effect in journalism to explore and illustrate…

  • D3 – 01 | Hello World

    Step 0 – Preparing the HTML Base HTML code that you can copy into a file. Alternatively, create an HTML skeleton file with your editor (e.g. Brackets, Sublime or TextMate) and made sure to link to the D3.js library. The Javascript code in the snippets should go within the script tag! You should enter your code…