If you’re disappointed with big data, you’re not paying attention
There has been a backlash lately against big data. From O’Reilly Media to the New Yorker, from Nassim Taleb to Kate Crawford, everyone is treating big data like a piñata. Gartner has dropped it into the “trough of disillusionment.” It might be provocative to call into question one of the hottest tech movements in generations, but it’s not really fair. Correlation versus causation versus “what’s good enough for the job” One of the biggest complaints — or, in some cases, proposed facts — about big data is that is relies more on correlation than causation in order to find its vaunted insights. Honestly, for song or product recommendations, who really cares? But in areas like medicine, finance and even marketing, people are becoming much more concerned with finding out “why” once they’ve found out “what.” Or if you’re a retail store, knowing that Mac users who visit your site tend to buy more-expensive products might make you want to show them more-expensive products.
Rickshaw: A JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time-series graphs
Graphing Toolkit Rickshaw provides the elements you need to create interactive graphs: renderers, legends, hovers, range selectors, etc. You put the pieces together. See Demo → Built on d3.js It's all based on d3 underneath, so graphs are drawn with standard SVG and styled with CSS. Open Source Rickshaw is free and open source, available under the MIT license. Getting Started Here's a minimal but complete working example. Area Graphs Lines Bars Scatterplot Interactive Legend Add a basic legend: Add functionality to toggle series' visibility on and off: Highlight each series on hover within the legend: Add drag-and-drop functionality to re-order the stack (requires jQueryUI): Interactive Hover Details Show the series value and formatted date and time on hover: Specify formatting callbacks to customize output: See the custom formatter and subclass examples for more. Annotations Add toggleable annotations: annotator.add(timestamp, message);annotator.update(); Range Slider Graphs & Data via AJAX / JSONP Tutorial
6 Great Interactive Data Visualization Tools (Part 2)
Welcome back for the second part of my series on interactive data visualization (dataviz) tools. In part one, we covered three cool tools for visualizing charts and graphs and many other data types on a webpage. In part two, we take a look at three more tools that are a bit more complex but have some incredible data visualization capabilities. 4. Exhibit is a very robust and customizable offering. Visualization Types Supported: Line Graphs, Maps, Scatter Plots, Multi-Filterable Lists, Timelines, Timeplots and more…with widgets! Flexible & Powerful Approach to Design I really like the approach of Exhibit, where data is presented through a "lens" – an HTML template shell that elements are placed into. Steep Learning Curve Like the other more complex libraries, there is more coding involved with Exhibit than most options, and having previous Javascript experience is definitely very helpful. 5. Javascript InfoVis Toolkit is a nice suite of tools for creating charts and graphs on a webpage.
Javascript based
Business Intelligence and user adoption: A Depp-esc disaster?
We’ve said it for a long time. In fact, we wrote a blog about it almost two years ago – What’s the Key Metric for Measuring BI Performance? The answer? “Simple – The rate of end-user adoption. That is, how many people in an organization who have access to BI software, actually use that software, and access the reports it generates, on a regular basis, to help them make operational and strategic business decisions.” And, much like the enduring partnership between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp – although their latest collaborative effort (Dark Shadows) received a dismal 42 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and had the LA Times wondering “has America fallen out of love with Johnny Depp?” Like our apparent overexposure to Burton and Depp’s quirky explorations of society’s social fringes, the necessity of BI user adoption is a message seemingly disregarded by an unreceptive audience – vendors and implementers alike. Research and advisory firms try again… Now back to that Aberdeen report… i. i. i.
