Legal Research

Timetric

By Simon Fodden

A couple of years ago I posted about IBM’s Many Eyes, a place to turn your datasets into graphs, charts and other ways to make their meanings visible. Timetric is another site/web-app enabling you to display your series of data in useful charts etc. It’s set up such that you can embed the graphic results of your work in a blog or web page and have them updated as your data is updated. Of course, to do that you have to upload your data to Timetric, as with the IBM site, and embed their display of it. But for the adventurous or skilled, this might be something to explore, because Timetric offers an API to let you interact with the site in interesting ways.

Because you’ll want to play around before you consider uploading data, they’ve salted the site with lots of data from U.K. government sources (principally) to stimulate your imagination. I’ve embedded below (squeezed slightly to fit) OECD data on seasonally adjusted employment rates for Canada (a search for “canada” turns up a lot of stats):

The chart is nicely done: dynamic, easy to read, and can be made full screen from a right mouse click menu. (It might be fun to put some Slaw stats up there to see how they look.) The site itself is very well designed, in my view: plenty of white space, good leading between lines, and a successful use of a serif face.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 11, 2009 (boomark / email).