Which Tools To Use?

To create sustainable data visualizations in partnership with local community organizations, we will choose appropriate technology that fits our criteria. Ideally, our web tools should be:

• adaptable to fit the most common data visualization needs of community partners, such as transforming existing tables into interactive charts and maps
• freely-accessible web services or applications (or at minimum, low cost)
• easy-to-learn with initial hands-on support and guidance from online tutorials and screencasts (and in some cases, customized templates created by Trinity for use by multiple Hartford organizations)
• collaborative so that partners can simultaneously work on co-creating visualization products, with ability to share or restrict viewing/editing access to individuals
• compatible for creating visualization products across popular operating systems (Mac or Windows), which ideally can be created or maintained in the browser (thereby expanding access to users with the free Chrome operating system)
• viewable for seeing and interacting with visualization products across multiple devices (desktops, laptops, most tablets & mobile devices), and across popular modern browsers (such as Chrome or Firefox), without third-party extensions (such as Flash or Silverlight)
• embeddable for easily inserting visualization products on most organization’s websites (such as WordPress and similar platforms)
• import and exportable so that organizations can easily upload new data into a visualization, or easily export data from a visualization when migrating to a new tool
• allow data sharing so that the public may easily access data underlying visualizations through an openly accessible web server, when desired, and preferably with an application programming interface (API)
• archivable so that the data (and tools, when feasible) can be stored for long-term use
• sustainable without significant new investments of time and money
• open source so that the underlying code may be freely shared and modified

Those are the ideals. The tools featured in this book fit most but not necessarily all of the criteria above. Our primary web technologies in this book are Google Sheets (for collaborative spreadsheets) and Google Fusion Tables (with web app templates by Derek Eder), Tableau Public, Socrate Open Data, and GitHub Pages. The book also explores the feasibility of other data visualization tools and services, such as OpenStreetMap and several application programming interfaces (aka APIs, to be listed) that may fit our criteria with pre-designed templates to be as user-friendly as possible.