Michael Perkins

I recently posted a couple of blog entries that included data charts. I initially created these charts in Microsoft Excel and then converted them into images for inclusion in the post. This process was labor intensive, and the result could best be described as embarrassing. Excel is a wonderful tool with a nice charting facility, but it was not intended for the creation of charts for the web. So I decided to explore alternatives. I took a close look at three free web-based data visualization tools. To get a good feel for each tool, I reworked two of my previous blog posts in each tool. Here are my thoughts. 

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a tool for creating complex, web-based data visualizations. The tool can be used to create highly interactive, multi-chart visualizations with dynamic filtering, highlighting and drill-down capabilities. Though I rarely have use for the more powerful features of Tableau Public, I was attracted to its capabilities for customizing the look-and-feel of charts and for adding text and annotations. However, Tableau Public's powerful set of features comes with a cost in usability. Of the products I reviewed, Tableau Public is by far the most difficult to use. Effective use of the product requires a significant investment of time and effort. It is not for the casual user.

I spent several hours learning the basics of Tableau Public and was able to create some very nice visualizations. Unfortunately, for my purposes, the visualizations have unacceptably slow load times. Though I am happy with the charts I was able to create with Tableau Public, I am not willing to subject my readers to such slow page loads. Tableau Public is a great solution for applications that require sophisticated, interactive visualizations where slow load times can be tolerated. It is not appropriate, however, for the light charting I need for my blog.

To get a feel both for the power of Tableau Public and for the time it takes to load its visualizations, click here to read an old post that includes a sophisticated Tableau Public visualization. 

Many Eyes and Swivel

Many Eyes and Swivel are similar in that they trade power for ease of use. I was able to create decent charts on both of these systems in minutes. Unlike Tableau Public, however, they do not offer a lot of control over the finished product. After spending time with Tableau Public, I was reluctant to give up some its features such as the ability to add text and annotations to charts. I finally decided, however, that for my purposes, the superior productivity and performance of Many Eyes and Swivel outweigh this loss of functionality.

Many Eyes offers more chart types than Swivel, but I found the look and feel of the Swivel charts to be more appealing. The Swivel charts are simple and elegant, and they load very quickly.  They work well in a blog post. Consequently, I selected Swivel as my tool of choice. Click here to view a version of my recent federal spending post that was reworked using Swivel.

The "explosion" of federal government spending is a hot topic in recent political debate, so I decided to take a close look at the Office of Management and Budget data to get a better understanding of the issue. The chart below shows federal fiscal year outlays from 1940 to 2009. Move your cursor over the line to see the exact numbers for any year.



First, note that the dramatic increase in 2009, relative to the increases in previous years, is due to roughly $345 billion in TARP and stimulus bill expenditures. If we remove these one-time expenses, we get something closer to George W. Bush's original $3.1 trillion 2009 budget. While this is a large number by any measure, it is certainly more in line with the spending increases of previous years.

Even if we look at 2009 as an anomaly, the chart still seems to show explosive growth over the last 40 years. What the chart fails to show, however, is that the U.S. economy has grown at roughly the same rate as federal spending. If we plot federal spending as a percentage of GDP, we get the chart below.



With the exception of the anomalous jump in 2009, federal spending has hovered around 20% of GDP since the early 1950s. Though it went as high as 23.5% during the Reagan years, it fell back below 20% during the Clinton administration. While we can have a legitimate debate about how much of GDP we should invest in the federal government, it is clear that the growth in federal spending as a percentage of our economy as a whole has been relatively flat for the last 60 years.

What has not been flat for the last 60 years is our unwillingness to fund this spending through taxes. The following chart, which plots both outlays and receipts since 1940, shows that with the exception of four years during the Clinton administration, we have been unwilling to properly fund our expenditures. Of course, this is the source of the current $13 trillion U.S. debt.



This table below shows which administration was responsible for each fiscal year budget. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to sort out how well the data conform to the political rhetoric from each side.

President	Fiscal Year Budgets
Franklin Roosevelt (D)	1934 - 1946
Harry Truman (D)	1947 - 1953
Dwight Eisenhower (R)	1954 - 1961
John Kennedy (D)	1962 - 1963
Lyndon Johnson (D)	1964 - 1969
Richard Nixon (R)	1970 - 1974
Gerald Ford (R)	1975 - 1977
Jimmy Carter (D)	1978 - 1981
Ronald Reagan (R)	1982 - 1989
George H. W. Bush (R)	1990 - 1993
Bill Clinton (D)	1994 - 2001
George W. Bush (R)	2002 - 2009

See Also:
Taxes at Lowest Level in 59 Years

Toxiclibs is an open source library of Java and Processing functions for computational design. The library contains functions for audio, color, geometry, math and physics. The following video is a collection of experiments and projects using the library.

toxiclibs showreel from postspectacular on Vimeo.

If you send a sample of your DNA to the folks at DNA 11, they will create a one-of-a-kind "art" work based on your DNA. The images don't really rock my boat, but the idea is very cool.

They also create works based on fingerprints and kisses.

Gapminder has just launched a new website.  If you've seen the Hans Rosling TED presentation that I posted a while ago, you have some idea what Gapminder is about.   Gapminder is a non-profit venture founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling in 2005.  Their motto is "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view."  In particular, Gapminder aggregates world economic, health and political statistics, and provides a wonderful facility, Gapminder World, for charting those statistics and analyzing trends.  The new website is nice.  Check it out.

The result of putting the full text of Hamlet into Wordle.net.

A TextArc is a visual representation of a text. In a TextArc analysis, the full text of a work is drawn in a tiny, one pixel tall line in two concentric spirals. Each distinct word is also drawn in a readable font at a location that is the average of all the actual word locations. Each of the readable words is then attached to the tiny words that occur in the text by lines.  This provides a graphical representation of the word's distribution in the text.

For a more detailed explanation and additional examples, check out http://www.textarc.org.

The following video was created by Jonathan Brandel using the Processing programming language. The overlayed animation appears to be reacting to motion in the video. Brandel describes it as "new type of interactive visualization combining computer vision and audio analysis." Click here for more awesome videos by Brandel.

News Dots  is a cool new service on Slate.com that represents current topics in the news as nodes in an interactive visual network. The network graph shows the relationships between the topics in addition to the importance of each topic.

News Dots uses Calais to automatically tag news stories from major publications. Relationships are established by identifying tags that appear together in the same stories. The visualization tool was built using flare, an ActionScript library for building interactive flash visualizations.

Click here to check it out.

Flightpattern is a cool audio-reactive animation programmed in ActionScript by Gwen Vanhee. The music is El Cargo by Amon Tobin.


Flightpattern from Gwen Vanhee on Vimeo.