Constitutional Law

VIDI Toolkit Makes Data Visualization Easy

By Aaron Presnall

You will love our powerful, intuitive Knight-funded data visualization toolkit: VIDI. Go to the website and try it out!

The site includes Drupal modules and a playground where you can work with pre-loaded data or upload your own data and generate embed code to place the visualizations you create on your blogs or websites. A "My VIDI" page shows the history of a user's visualizations so they can go back and edit at will.

We had a bit of a challenge recently in balancing our workload and the visceral drive to watch the World Cup games, so we came up with this visualization of video highlights from the matches (yes, I am also showing off our embedding feature):

World Cup 2010

This particular visualization uses our module TimelineMap, which was built as a Drupal Views 2 style plug-in. It is based on the Google Timemap API and allows you to load one or more datasets onto both a map and a timeline simultaneously. Only items in the visible range of the timeline are displayed as markers on the Google map.

Of course, you can also download the modules, load them into your own Drupal site and customize to your heart's content. Part of our idea in going with Drupal was that rather than try to create a community around our open source code, we would contribute code to an existing, thriving community. The interest and feedback from Drupalistas has been tremendous, which inspires us to push the development envelope even further.

We've already got some major early adopters. We helped Patchwork Nation implement the modules as a part of a larger port of their site to Drupal. Check out the colorful pie charts, bar charts, graphs, and the moving hardship index they created.

On the near horizon, we'll be releasing our VIDI Wizard module, which is still finishing up alpha testing. For now, though, please play with VIDI in your spare moments over the next two weeks when you're not glued to the World Cup, and let us know how we can make it even better!

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on July 02, 2010 (boomark / email).