It's been a while since I've put something up here... sorry to the 3 people that have ever visited the site for the wait! Several months have flown by largely due to the fact that I am back at school! One of the new toys I've had a chance to play with since being back in the classroom is Tableau, a well known data-visualization tool that is pretty powerful while still being very accessible to less-technical folks. There is no programming necessary to make it go, just point and click.
Currently I only have access to Tableau Public, a free-for-students version of the software that only allows you to save your work to the web, nothing can be saved locally. But with that limitation, you get access to a whole host of different public data including geographic and demographic data from the US Census. Additionally, with Tableau you can easily add some user-interaction to your visualizations and, with the public version, these interactions are carried over to the web. So without having to tinker around with any JavaScript libraries, boom, you've got a fun web tool.
Using some of the freely available data in my version of Tableau, I created the visualization below that takes a look at the adult obesity rates in the United States. Selecting a state on the right hand panel should zoom the graphic into that state and give you some more specific, corresponding information for that state in the scatter plots below the map. Let me know what you think below, have you ever used Tableau public? Anything cool I should know?
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