{"id":1039,"date":"2014-03-30T17:47:03","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T21:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2014-03-30T19:04:33","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T23:04:33","slug":"sample-ct-open-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/2014\/03\/30\/sample-ct-open-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample CT Open Data interactive chart with Tableau Public"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, the Connecticut Open Data portal opened with a handful of files to demonstrate the state&#8217;s initiative in sharing public data. Check out the data that&#8217;s currently available on the Socrata platform at <a href=\"https:\/\/data.ct.gov\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/data.ct.gov<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Also, I was curious to find out what types of interactive data visualizations could be easily created with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tableausoftware.com\/public\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tableau Public<\/a> (free download, but Windows only, requires free account for web services). This application competes with Google Fusion Tables, a free cross-platform data visualization tool, which I&#8217;ve been teaching to my Trinity students.<\/p>\n<p>Tableau Public has limitations, and users are encouraged to upgrade to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tableausoftware.com\/products\/desktop\" target=\"_blank\">Tableau Desktop<\/a> (free trial, but full retail price is $999, with education\/non-profit discount; Windows only). One limitation of Tableau Public is the lack of a direct link to the CT Open Data\/Socrata web platform, which means that I could not display &#8220;live&#8221; data. Therefore, I had to export a sample data file into Excel, and upload into Tableau Public, where the dashboard allowed me to construct an interactive chart with &#8220;static&#8221; data. The interface seemed relatively straightforward to me, but I&#8217;ve used dozens of data tools over the years. The chart-design mode below seemed similar to the Microsoft Excel pivot table feature, if you&#8217;ve ever used that one.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1040\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1040\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/TableauPublicDashboard.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1040\" alt=\"Dashboard view of Tableau Public\" src=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/TableauPublicDashboard.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"383\" srcset=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/TableauPublicDashboard.jpg 600w, http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/TableauPublicDashboard-300x191.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1040\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dashboard view of Tableau Public<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Next, I created a free Tableau Public web services account to save my work online, and it generated a results screen with a long HTML embed code. To display the interactive visualization on your own site, users need to host this code on another live website, and in my case, I simply pushed it into a <a href=\"http:\/\/jackdougherty.github.io\/tableau-public-sample\/\" target=\"_blank\">GitHub Pages repository<\/a>, as I&#8217;ve taught my students to do in our <a href=\"http:\/\/epress.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\" target=\"_blank\">DataViz book-in-progress<\/a>.\u00a0To embed that live site on this WordPress.org post, I embedded an\u00a0iframe\u00a0with the URL source into the text\/code view.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/SampleIframeShortcode.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1043\" alt=\"SampleIframeShortcode\" src=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/SampleIframeShortcode.jpg\" width=\"504\" height=\"114\" srcset=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/SampleIframeShortcode.jpg 504w, http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/files\/2014\/03\/SampleIframeShortcode-300x67.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 504px) 100vw, 504px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The live data visualization appears below &#8212; be sure to explore its interactive features.<\/p>\n\n<!-- iframe plugin v.4.5 wordpress.org\/plugins\/iframe\/ -->\n<iframe src=\"http:\/\/jackdougherty.github.io\/tableau-public-sample\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"500\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe>\n\n<p>Overall, Tableau Public &#8212; when used in combination with a web hosting platform &#8212; looks like a relatively easy way for non-profit organizations to create interactive data visualizations and embed them on their websites. At first glance, Tableau Public appears to have a wider range of out-of-the-box visualization designs than Google Fusion Tables. So why did I decide NOT to teach Tableau Public to my Trinity students in spring 2014? The major roadblock is that the application is currently Windows-only, and most of my students use Macs. While I have Windows virtualization (e.g. Parallels) installed on my Mac, that&#8217;s not a luxury that&#8217;s available to most of my students. Still, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geekwire.com\/2014\/tableau-mac-coming-finally\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tableau recently announced<\/a> that it will release a Mac version in the second quarter of 2014, though it&#8217;s unclear to me whether this means the free Tableau Public and\/or the not-so-free Tableau Desktop. Wait and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, the Connecticut Open Data portal opened with a handful of files to demonstrate the state&#8217;s initiative in sharing public data. Check out the data that&#8217;s currently available on the Socrata platform at https:\/\/data.ct.gov Also, I was curious to find out what types of interactive data visualizations could be easily created with Tableau Public &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/2014\/03\/30\/sample-ct-open-data\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sample CT Open Data interactive chart with Tableau Public<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1042,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions\/1042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/dataviz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}