Useful tools to review, refine, clean, analyze, visualize and publish data | Health Data Innovation

“Over the last few days, O'Reilly's Alex Howard (aka @digiphile) has published a series of very informative interviews with data journalists. As journalists get more and more sophisticated in collecting, collating, analyzing and visualizing data, their learnings are really useful for anyone working with data. The interviews contain lots of great insight, very useful information, and interesting links to more resources and examples, and I encourage you to read them in their entirety (see links below). However, most interesting to me are the tools that the interviewees mention and which Alex calls the "Newsroom Stack". Any number of those tools may be used in sequence to get from your set of data to useful insights. I used the additional comments from the journalists to add to my own list of useful data tools; some key ones below, the rest on the Health Data Innovation Tools page... [The blogger provides an extensive list of links for the recommended tools including: data tools for conversion, exploration, and analysis; data visualization and GIS packages;databases; data visualization platforms; maps and GIS, data publishing solutions providers; electronic health records; data tools for patients and more. Many of the recommendations are open source.] Here are the articles; check back on the O'Reilly Radar data page for more: The Newsroom Stack ... Interview 1: Liliana Bounegru (@bb_liliana), project coordinator of SYNC3 ... Interview 2: Dan Nguyen (@dancow), news app developer at ProPublica ... Interview 3: Derek Willis (@derekwillis), news developer at New York Times ... Interview 4: Ben Welsh (@palewire), Web developer at Los Angeles Times ... Interview 5: Michelle Minkoff (@MichelleMinkoff), investigative developer/journalist at AP... This should put you in the right mood to have a look at the ‘Effective Data Visualization’ presentation by Hjalmar Gislason (aka @datamarket) at Strata this week. It's a great account of the considerations necessary for anyone that wants to create visualizations. Very useful: if you download the PDF from Slideshare, the slides contain links to more information online.”