The Guardian produced a set of data that they'd collected for the results of the recent European elections, and published the data as a Google Spreadsheet.
I cloned the spreadsheet and tidied it up (HTML version), then imported it into Google Fusion Tables.
In Fusion Tables I created two separate views of the data - one showing just the number of votes for each party, and one showing the % of votes for each party.
From the Visualize menu, anyone should now be able to visualise that data in different ways: currently the sortable Table, Scatter and Bar visualisations are the most interesting; the Intensity Map would be good, but doesn't yet have enough options to present this data well.
Google's attempt to automatically geocode the location fields is interesting; there needs to be an option to limit the scope of the geocoding, perhaps.
Comments
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That's a nice start. Perhaps you'll get the right coordinates by adding a ", uk" behind the location names? I hoped I could easiyl manipulate the data in that way, but ended up in a world of browser slowness and Google FAIL.
Unfortunately this also drives home the fact that it'll take a lot of work to make these graphs really good as in good looking, easy to navigate and with confidence that the information displayed matches what you put in. And that Google's tools for this don't really help doing that.
On 'location' fields, you can click the little globe icon to edit the actual coordinates using a map, which is nice.
I've been using Safari 4 for Javascript-intensive sites like these, and it's working nicely.
I've been using Safari 4 as well and wasn't too impressed. (In fact on other JS heavy pages I also have the impression that Firefox is faster.) But with the complex beast that is the internet, it could be slow connections, solar flares or pretty much anything else causing this.
The globe icon trick sounds neat. I guess it only works for the owner of the spreadsheet, as I just seemed to be able to leave pointless comments.
But my point was more the total tedium of trying to do something that sounds very simple: add a ", UK" to each place name. I couldn't figure out how to do that. Perhaps an access rights problem again, but possibly a consequence of beta-ness or the fact that making applications work well together is non-trivial.
That must be a permissions thing - if you were to make your own copy of the spreadsheet you could add a new column and use CONCATENATE to add ", UK" to the addresses. Would have to reimport the spreadsheet to Fusion Tables then though.
Actually I tried just that but it seems I didn't find the button for moving the data between the services. I didn't want to go for an endless hunt either, particularly as I didn't know how much extra effort you put into making things work after importing them to the Fusion thing. I think, conceptually, I don't really understand why Fusion is a completely separate tool rather than a menu item in Spreadsheets.
P.S. Two remarks on your site. 1. I have the impression that the 'Remember personal info' checkbox doesn't work. 2. With the wide images you have in recent posts, they do cover the sidebar on the home page in my browser window. Perhaps tweaking the background colours and the z-indices a bit can give a better look there.
Thanks for the prompt to fix the overflow for large images, done that now. 'Remember personal info' is broken, for sure.
From the Google Spreadsheet at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rn2wKXhx8qswQMex3YhViqA
you should be able to do File > Create a copy... then make changes and reimport it to Fusion Tables. Awkward still, but Fusion Tables is only "pre-alpha" so can't complain.
As I said, this was a world of FAIL when I tried it last week (import just cancelled itself). Tried it again today and it worked nos. Geolocation seems to work better that way but the general display is still too crappy to be considered useful.
http://tables.googlelabs.com/DataSource?dsrcid=23425/23425