by Angela Guess
A recent article discusses how Tableau, a Seattle-based data visualization company is making data more accessible and interesting to end users through visualization. The article notes, “As more and more data gets uploaded to the Web, it needs to be analyzed and made sense of. Data visualization is one of the most effective ways of doing this and Tableau is a leading company in this field… Tableau’s vision is to ‘see and understand the world’s data.’ The company has carved out a particular niche with media organizations, who use Tableau software to enable their readers to play with data in interactive way – for example customizing charts.”
It continues, “Wall St Journal, CNN Money and Seattle Times are a few of the media publications that use Tableau. One of the more impressive examples was a data visualization on CNN Money, showing where mortgage foreclosures were happening in Q1 2010. Here it is embedded below. You can drag your mouse over a certain part of the country, for example California, to view just the data from that area. Further analysis is possible using drag and drop controls and the small menu at the bottom of the chart. The idea is that the reader becomes more engaged with the story and dives deeper into data if they wish. It’s another part of the evolution of the read/write Web – nowadays people can interact with data, not just read it.”
The article goes on, “Tableau’s goal is that anyone who cares about data should be able to work with it. But often there has already been a lot of work done on the data from so-called ‘Data Journalists’ – who have been adopting Tableau’s software with glee. There is a term for this type of reporting: Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR). CAR has been around for a while, but Tableau makes the process faster and saves journalists from doing custom programming. According to Tableau’s Ellie Fields, ‘fast authoring has been a big driver of uptake’ among data journalists.”
photo credit: Tableau
