Exhibit: Easy Data Visualization for Journalists
At NICAR we worked through the
following hands-on workshop for
constructing an Exhibit. Download the zip file and open
hands-on.html; it will walk you through all the steps.
This page is a resource for journalists who are interested in using
our Exhibit library for creating interactive data visualizations in
their stories. Our goal is to make this easy, which means different
things for journalists and for developers:
- For journalists, the goal is tools you can use to author
visualizations by yourselves, without help from developers
- For developers, the goal is a framework that lets you create
visualizations faster, while still maintaining fine-grained control
over the look of the final product.
In pursuit of these goals Exhibit comes in two flavors.
- The Exhibit javascript
library can be incorporated in any web page. It enriches the
HTML vocabulary with tags like <MAP>, <TIMELINE>,
<SORTABLE_LIST>, <CHART>, <FACET> (for filtering
the data in the visualization), and <SEARCH_BOX> that you can
drop anywhere on your web page the same as any other HTML tags.
Then you include a link to a data file (csv, spreadsheet, json file,
xml file, google spreadsheet, etc.) and our library takes care of
showing the data through the tags you placed. The looks of the
elements can be controlled using CSS.
- Datapress is
a Wordpress plugin you can
find on
the wordpress site. It enriches the basic wordpress editor with
wizards and dialogs that let you upload or link to a data file and
then specify the visualization elements you want in your post.
Exhibit Basics
Here you can find information about the Exhibit Javascript library and
examples of its use.
Exhibits at news sites
Several newspapers have published stories including exhibits; a
partial list is here.
Other Examples
Datapress
Basic information about the Datapress plugin for Wordpress: