Why maps are useful visualization tools? What doesn’t work with maps? Today we hosted a School of Data skillshare with Codrina Ilie, School of data Fellow.

Codrina Ilie shares perspectives on building a map project

What makes a good map? How can perspective, assumptions and even colour change the quality of the map? This is a one-hour video skillshare to learn all about map making from our School of Data fellow:

Learn some basic mapping skills with slides

Resources:

• BBC series – Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession –
• The ColourBrewer is a tool to design maps

http://www.davidrumsey.com/

• OSGeo Live
• Book: How Maps Lie

(Note: the hand drawn map was created at School of Data Summer Camp. Photo by Heather Leson CCBY)

In this 40 minute video, Hannah shares some tips and best practices:

Design by slides

The world is a design museum – what existing designs achieve similar things? How specifically do they do this? How can this inform your digital storytelling?

Resources:

Want to learn more? Here are some great resources from Hannah and the network:

• Open Font Library
• Google Fonts
• Photo Pin (Creative Commons Images)
• Image Optimizer
• NattyWare (image fixing)
• Screenpresso

Hannah shared some of her other design work. It is great to see how data & design can be used in urban spaces: Project Busart.

We are planning more School of Data Skillshares. In the coming weeks, there will be sessions about impact & evaluation as well as best practices for mapping.

We began with a jargon-busting exercise, and working out where the common problems were that people in the room were facing. Common themes were accessibility, actual availability of the data and data validity.

There were also common terms that people had heard, but weren’t so sure about – as always, lots of acronyms! API, CSV, RSS, to name a few. Here are some others:

Next, we talked about a topic that often gets missed out in open data discussions: data ethics. Here, we didn’t just mean how to make sure your data is correct and you’re reporting things accurately, but also in terms of what data you’re publishing and working with, what you’re asking from the government, and how you deal with sensitive topics.

This topic sparked lots of discussions among the group; from wondering what to do with data that is available about the families of parliamentarians, to the line between what is considered ‘public’ and what is considered to be ‘private’ data, and questioning the role that cultural context has to play in making these judgements.

Especially as lots of the groups present work with election data, the question of public-private data – ie. data on those elected to public office – is particularly pertinent, and it definitely sounded like there was a lot more to be explored.

Next, Ramda gave us a quick run through of where to find data, including the new Indonesian data portal (I was happy to discover it’s running on CKAN, too!) – http://data.id. Lots of the participants had expressed a desire to delve into data visualisations, and Perludem were kind enough to provide us with an incrediblye 3000 pieces of Lego, so we were excited to run our first ‘offline data visualisation’ session, with Lego!

Some of our favourite offline visualisations:

Visualising the room: the group here gathered data on participants, and visualised it, by gender, and then looking at more detailed ‘features’ – how many of us were wearing glasses (45%) – rings (21%) – watches (33%) – and batik shirts (21%).

Visualising World Bank development indicators on Indonesia: (personally, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen done with World Bank data, ever!) – different economic indicators are shown visualised between two different years (the red and the yellow) – and, it’s all shaped into the rough shape of Indonesia!

And, the loudest cheer went to the group who used paper as well as lego, to visualise commodity prices in Indonesia!

The next day was dedicated mainly to taking those offline visualisation skills online, using Datawrapper and Infogr.am. Here, we saw the importance of cleaning the data, and of organising the data correctly in terms of rows and columns (the ‘transpose’ feature on Datawrapper was greatly appreciated!)

You can see a list of infographics and visualisations created by participants here, and we’ve embedded a couple of our favourites at the bottom of this post.

We also learned about APIs, and started planning for future plans of working with election data in Indonesia, in a great interactive session facilitated by Perludem.

Big thanks to our hosts Perludem, and the Asia Foundation for their financial support for the event. We hope to see you all very soon!

– which shows gender split between members of the regional legislative parliament.

Number of violations in the Presidential Elections:

About School of Data Summer Camp

The School of Data Summer Camp brought together local initiatives and School of Data Fellows to build the foundation for a buzzing and productive coming year. Last year we kicked off a Spanish, French, Portuguese and Greek site as well as local initiatives around the world. On a more individual level we’ve been working with fellows worldwide to bring data skills to their communities. With a new round of fellows coming we want to get together and unify our vision, goals and methods. Our goal was to make everyone go home with better skills and a clear vision where we’ll take the School of Data together!

Special thanks goes to our funders who made all of this possible: Partnership for Open Data (World Bank, Open Data Institute, and Open Knowledge), Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundations, IndigoTrust, the British Embassy Skopje, Hivos, and SEATTI.

(Video Created by Sam Muirhead of Camera Libre)