Cross-posted from Samhir Vasdev’s Medium channel.
This tutorial accompanies the Amazon episode of our new series about liberating and visualizing our personal data. Check it out below:
A snapshot of my Amazon order history reveals my heavier spending on Fridays. Full infographic here.
I’m hooked on Amazon.
And I’m sure I’m not alone. …
What stories would you tell with data from your daily life?
In September 2014, two award-winning information designers living on different sides of Atlantic, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, collaborated on a year-long project to collect, visualize, and share information about their daily lives. Each week they would hand-draw representations of their activities and thoughts as part of a process to use data to become more humane …
We consume and produce data at ever growing rates, aiming to better understand the past, observe the now, and to be better prepared for the future. However, data can only fulfill its purpose when we can make sense of it, generate insights, and put it into action. The process of turning data into insights requires many steps, and doing it effectively involves many strategies.
Step 1: Visualization …
How do you make the invisible visible? How can we keep up with our ever-changing world, and how can we utilize the technologies of our time? Upon the completion of TechChange’s Mapping for Social Good course, we have found that some answers lie within the realm of digital mapping and geospatial data collection.
From Theory to Practice
The course features four …
TechChange courses are designed for busy young professionals. In any of our courses, you will find yourself taking the course alongside international development field and headquarter staff, university professors and students, freelancers, and so many other kinds of eager learners. Today, we are excited to chat with Eva Erlach, who is a full-time law student in Vienna, Austria and also works part-time for Ground Truth Solutions. …
Social media has become a very important diplomacy tool to engage with the public. Realizing the evolving nature of diplomacy in the 21st century, the Italian embassy in Washington, DC regularly hosts their #digitaldiplomacy series to discuss the role of technology in diplomacy and to engage with all stakeholders and partners.
Today, there are tech tools, beyond social media, that have the potential to promote diplomacy and …
Data is useless unless it provides us with actionable insights into our work. In order to make sense of the data, however, we need to understand it, which is why data visualization is so important. Technology has made it easier to translate data into understandable and aesthetically pleasing visualizations, but with so many options out there, it can be hard to know where to begin and …
Over the years, TechChange has provided several professionals in the international development community with the crucial tech skills needed to make an impact in their work. Oftentimes, learning tech skills means first learning a software as basic as Microsoft Excel. We have all worked with Excel, but few of us really know its power to meet a wide range of data analysis and visualization needs. To fill …
Imagine a tool where you have text and a computer automatically highlights key themes. No need to do complex coding, no word counts that are used to explore the text — just keywords and phrases identified. This is exactly what the tool Textio does for job descriptions. It automatically provides an effectiveness score and identifies words and phrases that affect whether applicants will apply for a job: …
Data visualization requires more than design skills. You need both technical and critical thinking skills to create the best visuals for your audience. It is important to match your visualization to your viewer’s information needs. You should always be asking yourself: “What are they looking for?”
1. Understand your audience before designing your visualization
The first and most important consideration is …
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