Help with an open-source data vis tool for tunisian journalists

[Nikki Usher]

Hi:

You all are a great resource for this pretty important question. We're doing
something totally cool: training journalists in Tunisia about how to cover
elections now that, you know, there's no state censorship... it's a whole
recalibration, but I think we're doing it in a culturally sensitive way.

We'd really like to give these journalists the tool to do easy data
visualization and mapping - I'm thinking something that makes it easy to
draw charts, maps, input graphics or user comments, all of the things we've
been talking about as part of the MoJo site. Ushahidi is kind of the right
idea, but it draws almost too heavily on crowds. We're talking about
something a journalist can use to input some data, say from a poll, and get
a really easy visualization.

Many thanks, and if you see a tweet like this on the twitters, my apologies.
Trying to reach as many people for this. For your knowledge, the program is
being run through the US Embassy through a State Department grant and
administered by Georgia State University.

--
Nikki Usher, PhD
Assistant Professor
George Washington University
School of Media and Public Affairs
(o) 202-994-3841 (m) 213-220-7824
www.nikkiusher.com

[Bdavis]

I will be out of the office until Monday, Sept. 19.

Bob Davis
Editor
The Anniston Star
bda...@annistonstar.com
256-235-3540
Twitter: twitter.com/EditorBobDavis

[Erin Polgreen]

Hi, Nikki.

>
Have you talked to the folks at Tableau Public? They've got a great, free
version of their data viz tool for journalists. It's not open source, but
they do provide great backend support at no cost. I'd be happy to connect
you.

>
Best,

> Erin

>
Please excuse the typos! This email was sent via iPhone.

> > _______________________________________________
> > community-mojo mailing list
> > communi...@lists.mozilla.org
> > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-mojo
>



--
Erin Polgreen
Managing Director, The Media Consortium

@tmcmedia <http://twitter.com/tmcmedia> /
@erinpolgreen<http://twitter.com/erinpolgreen>
312.841.0553

[Wendy Norris]

Hi Nikki,

As Peter mentioned on the NICAR list, Tableau Public would work well but be
advised it is only accessible on Windows-based computers. Mac users are out
of luck.

Many Eyes <http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/> is a free,
web-based product for charts and visualizations. All you need to do is
upload a CSV file and select the type of visual that best represents the
data expression -- not all do and some could lead to misinterpreting your
results.

Google Fusion Tables<https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=fusiontables&passive=1209600&continue=http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home&followup=http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home>is
also a free product but requires quite a bit more technical skill than
Many Eyes. But it does some really cool things with your data.

Hope this is helpful,

Wendy



***wendy norris*
journalist | media rabblerouser | news entrepreneur | 2011 Stanford Knight
Fellow

<http://twitter.com/wendynorris>
<https://plus.google.com/113849328402494048580/posts>
<http://wendynorris.tumblr.com/> <http://linkedin.com/in/wendynorris>
<http://www.diigo.com/user/wendynorris> <http://wendynorris.com/?page_id=15>

[Mr. Caggiano]

Dipity could be a good too for this as a way to curate social media across a timeline during the run up to the election.

Here is an example of how it was used by the Seattle Times to track down the suspects of the Lakewood Police shooting in their Pulitzer prize winning hunt.
http://www.dipity.com/timeline/Lakewood-Police-Shooting/

Many Eyes is a great tool, just note that all uploaded datasets are required to be public, I don't believe there is a private option if that is needed.

OpenHeatMap -- http://openheatmap.org -- is dead simple and can be powerful if you have good data. Would be useful for showing geographic density of support for different candidates.

Haven't used Vuvox, but I'm looking at some pretty nice multimedia collages i.e. -- http://www.vuvox.com/my_vox/show/01665b4416?presentation=0143d49315

Also don't forget we have a TON of resources on this EtherPad that the MoJo community made a while back
http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/MoJo-inspirationhub


Hope that helps, keep us posted sounds like an interesting project, and ask the Journalism That Matters list as well for good measure
~Jacob

[dan]

You should definitely rope in Sara Farmer:

sa...@unglobalpulse.org

She's a crisis mapper / technologist with UN Global Pulse. Knows every
product, team, organisation in this space.

Also, Mark Belinsky from Digital Democracy is a world leader in this, and
has set up grass-roots information gathering in various places:

mbel...@digital-democracy.org

Cheers,
Dan

On 14 September 2011 14:30, Erin Polgreen <er...@themediaconsortium.com>wrote:

> Hi, Nikki.
>
> >
> Have you talked to the folks at Tableau Public? They've got a great, free
> version of their data viz tool for journalists. It's not open source, but
> they do provide great backend support at no cost. I'd be happy to connect
> you.
>
> >
> Best,
>
> > Erin
>
> >
> Please excuse the typos! This email was sent via iPhone.
>
> >

> --
> Erin Polgreen
> Managing Director, The Media Consortium
>
> @tmcmedia <http://twitter.com/tmcmedia> /
> @erinpolgreen<http://twitter.com/erinpolgreen>
> 312.841.0553

[Heather Leson]

HI Nikki, you could also use Crowdmap or Ushahidi for interactive mapping
and data visualization.

It has been used for Election Monitoring in Kenya, Egypt, Guatemala and
other countries.
http://uchaguzi.co.ke/
http://www.miradorelectoralguatemala.org/ushahidi-new/

It was also used in the Middle East for violence and crisis response
monitoring - http://libyacrisismap.net/ and
http://syrianspring.crowdmap.com/


Happy to connect you with other mappers and deployers for more information.

Heather L.

Heather Leson
Director of Community Engagement
Ushahidi
heathe...@gmail.com
Twitter: HeatherLeson
Blog: textontechs.com

[cliff argwings]

Sounds a really nice discussion you guys are having here -(: with the
mention of Ushahidi):D. So you guys are working on a voting system right?

Just Curious!

//cliff

[Jo Ellen Kaiser]

Junar might also be a possible tool to use and it's free.

Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, Executive Director
The Media Consortium
tel: 415.878-3862
twitter: jgksf
email: joe...@themediaconsortium.com
www.themediaconsortium.com

--

[Mr. Caggiano]

Fabulous! Just added all these resource examples to the Etherpad
~Jacob

[Nikki Usher]

This is awesome folks. Thank you. We will keep you posted about the project.
It all has to be really simple since these folks are covering elections in a
free-press kind of way for the first time, and also have to respond in some
way to the clear use of social media in their country. It's going to be
interesting...

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Mr. Caggiano <ja...@fishbowlescape.com>wrote:

> Fabulous! Just added all these resource examples to the Etherpad
> ~Jacob
>

[dan]

This is not free or open source, but if you find that
nationbuilder.comcomes close to what you want in terms of creating a
community of publishers,
then I'd be happy to build whatever mapping features you require into the
product. Such are the privileges of ostensibly running the development team
;-)

I know it claims to be a "political" tool, but really you can do a lot of
community-driven publishing with it in general. It's supposed to be a tool
that helps to decentralise and democratise power.

Dan