VizWorld.com

Tableau has an interesting visualization of the many natural disasters in the last 2 decades and lets you look at death tools, financial damage, and other figures across the US.

I used the visualization and zoomed in to see what’s been happening since 2004. The cost of Hurricane Katrina was $145 billion and caused 1,833 deaths. As you’ll notice in the image above, Katrina is the dot way up at the top along 2005. By comparison, Irene cost $7 billion and caused 21 deaths.

via Visualization: How does Hurricane Irene compare to other hurricanes? | SmartPlanet.

Science tableau, weather

This weekend Sanjay Bhatt received the Gannett Award for Digital Innovation in Watchdog Journalism for a great piece in The Seattle Times about the US Treasury’s loan-modification program.  The article itself was good, but the point was really driven home with a nice interactive visualization powered by Tableau Public.

“We’re incredibly happy for Sanjay,” said Elissa Fink, Tableau Software’s Chief Marketing Officer.  “He has done amazing work and is consistently ahead of the curve in digital reporting. We’re very proud that he uses Tableau Public to tell his stories.”

via Writer from The Seattle Times uses Tableau Public in groundbreaking reporting, wins Gannett Award | Cision Wire.

Graphics award, gannett, tableau

SmartDataCollective has an interview with Tableau’s Ellie Fields on the importance of data visualization and it’s many benefits.

Take any computer science Ph.D. and put five pages of rows and numbers in front of them and they’re not going to very quickly understand what’s in there. Our brains just don’t work that way. Our brains work in stories and they work in pictures. What data visualization allows you to do is take a whole bunch of numbers and tell stories with it. There’s almost never just one story in a dataset. Different people might have different stories they care about.

via Pushing the Data Visualization Envelope: an Interview with Tableau’s Ellie Fields | SmartData Collective.

Science interview, tableau

Tableau, in cooperation with the Economist Ideas Economy conference, is cranking up a big contest for their free Tableau Public tool that could result in a nice 3-night stay in Vegas for the event, $2000 in cash, and a new iPad2.

The winner chosen by our judges will also take away a free roundtrip ticket to attend the 2011 Tableau Customer Conference. This includes 3 night’s accommodations at the Encore and a chance to compete in the Iron Viz championship with the winners of two other contests. The winner of Iron Viz will take away a new iPad2, and $2,000.

Interestingly, there are no restrictions on input data.  So go find your favorite dataset, make a smooth viz, and if nothing else all entries get a free Tableau T-Shirt!

via The Tableau Interactive “Viz” Contest | Tableau Public.

Science contest, tableau

Tableau took some heat when they unexpectedly took down the publicly-created visualizations of the WikiLeaks cables.  Realizing that perhaps that wasn’t the best solution to the touchy subject, they’ve spent some time working on a better solution.  Today, they’ve announced a new Data Policy and Advisory Board, hopefully to prevent this from happening again.

The two main changes to our data policy are:

1. We are establishing a more formal complaint process, by which people can challenge data posted to Tableau Public. By outlining specific circumstances in which we will consider taking down data, the new policy puts complaints through a higher level of scrutiny than before.

2.  We’re more closely aligning our policy with the accepted guidelines for free speech on the internet. You can access our full data policy for more detail at www.tableausoftware.com/public/data-policy.

The advisory board contains people from media, technology, publishing, and communications around the world, offering a nice balanced mix of expertise.

As public data becomes a bigger driver, and more companies find themselves playing the role of “data brokers” and “Visualization brokers”, we’re going to hear more and more about these types of scenarios.  What do you think?  Did Tableau do a good job? Could they have done more?

via The Data is In: New Policy & Advisory Board for Tableau Public | Tableau Public.

Science legal, political, tableau

Pocket-Lint has an interview with Tableau CEO and co-founder Christian Chabot about the direction of the company, and how they are trying to carve their niche out of the new web2.0 data visualization boom.

Analytics and stats might sound dull unless you’re an accountant, but to Chabot, if done right, they are about empowering us to understand more.

“We are trying to create a category for data blogging,” says Chabot, hoping to change the world through the medium of numbers. “Data is just another content type. We’re trying to be the YouTube for data.”

via Christian Chabot – The man looking to make your data cool – Pocket-lint.

Graphics interview, tableau

The latest WikiLeaks release has been all over the news lately, but I’ve largely ignored it as it has nothing to do with visualization.  However, I just found a hook in a recent move by Tableau with their free online Tableau Public data visualization offering.  Someone created some visualizations of the newest leaks using Tableau Public, and yesterday Tableau removed all of them.

Wednesday afternoon, Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public. We understand this is a sensitive issue and want to assure the public and our users that this was not an easy decision, nor one that we took lightly.

Of course, just as it’s someone’s right to publish the visualization, it’s Tableau’s right to refuse to partake in it.  Plus, their TOS make that quite clear:

Our terms of service require that people using Tableau Public do not upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any content that they do not have the right to make available. Furthermore, if we receive a complaint about a particular set of data, we retain the right to investigate the situation and remove any offending data, if necessary.

I’m personally saddened that they decided to take them down, but with the recent political turmoil and political moves like Interpol issuing arrest statements and recent moves in US congress to introduce “Anti-wikileaks” legislation, it seems they might have come down less gracefully in the future anyway.

What do you think?

via Why we removed the WikiLeaks visualizations | Tableau Software.

Science tableau, wikileaks

Tableau Software, brainchild of a former Pixar founder, has just released the newest version of their flagship product Tableau 6.  Taking on all the major players in business intelligence, the new version has some huge improvements.

From the speed of the Data Engine to the I-can’t-believe-it ease of Data Blending, Tableau 6 will change what you can achieve with data. And with more than 60 new features including beautifulcombination charts and page trails, you’ll never forget the first time you had 6.

To celebrate the launch, today is the first day of “Six Education Day“.  A collection of 6 licensed experts are on-hand to field questions submitted via blog comments, email, or Twitter.  In addition, every 6-minutes after the hour they’ll be giving away “Joy of 6″ T-Shirts!

So go check it out, they have a free 14 day trial you can download and play with (if you’re on a Windows Machine), and view the PDF of all the new features.

via What’s New in Tableau 6.0 | Tableau Software.

Science software, tableau

Tableau Public has only been out for 5 months, and today has released some of the initial figures on usage.  So far, over 4.5 Million Tableau visualizations have been viewed, gracing the websites of such major companies as USA Today and CBSSports.  To celebrate, they analyzed their logs to collect the Top 100 Visualizations for our viewing pleasure.

Among the Top 100, the most commonly viewed category is sports and the most interactive category is travel and lifestyle. Interactivity lets viewers explore the data within the visualization. People have created vizes on a wide range of topics, including worldwide alien abductions, the hottest U.S. cities for muscle cars and the all-time best basketball players.

Congratulations to Tableau for making the big time only 5 months in!  Full press release after the break.

Read more…

Science tableau

A great little visualization from “The State Of The USA” compiles data from around the world of historical nuclear stockpile sizes into a nice interactive visualization on Tableau Public.

The size of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads was officially disclosed in May to promote transparency and give a boost to non-proliferation efforts, according to the Department of Defense. Once a closely guarded secret, the number of nukes was released on background, or without attribution, by a DOD official. As of Sept. 30, 2009, there were 5,113 warheads in the U.S. arsenal — an 84 percent reduction from the stockpile's peak in 1967. From 1994 through 2009, the U.S. dismantled 8,748 warheads, the department said.

Some nice information here, and great use of annotations. This is quite possibly one of the most ‘beautiful’ and clean Tableau Visualizations I’ve seen.

via The State of the USA | The State of Our Nuclear Stockpile.

Science government, nuclear, tableau