How do *you* dig through masses of data?
Many of you know the problem: you are looking through a bunch of experiments, trying to understand what is happening. Maybe you are working on a screening problem, maybe you are even organized and structured and are using a statistical approach. But often you are not, and it is just looking at data, looking at plots of X versus Y, X versus Z, A versus B, etc.
How do you find the “golden data point”? What tools do you use for this? My best take right now is Microsoft Excel, but also a tool like Umetrics’s MODDE helps a lot if you really control the data you want to compare.
I just realized that Google has published a new API for data visualization, which supposedly can be used together with GoogleDocs. Has anyone tried that? (and also very nice is Google’s image generator for charts).
And then I came across this: Gapminder world data, which is just amazing.
Is there any way I can get my data to be displayed like this, interactively an as flexible? Anyone know how? (some trackbacks)
IBM’s Many eyes could also be an alternative choice to display your data.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
If you need a specific graphics for your data you could ask for it here:
http://network.nature.com/forum/nncollaborations
or here:
http://network.nature.com/group/scivis
pierre
Thanks Pierre for your links. This seems to be a cool and quite similar way to the new google stuff.
But are there apps where you can actually dig through data easily, plotting anything against anything else? Pretty graphs are a plus, but definitely no must…
I use php to parse thorough my data, and then have my own graphical program I’ve written in php display the data, or I’ll just spit it out to excel. I’ll have to play more with Google’s API thanks for the info.
Mitch