Where to get data for flourish

app flourish

This resource page presents content from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) titled «Data Journalism and Visualization with Free Tools.» The six-week course ran from October 14 to November 24, 2019. Now, we are making its content freely available to students who took the course and anyone else interested in data journalism, visualization and the free tools that exist in the market to develop it.

1. «Buzzfeed algorithm that revealed secret spy planes» – Adriano Belisario’s summary of the article ‘We trained a computer to look for hidden spy planes. This is what it found’ – Translation by Paulette Desormeaux

flourish templates

Flourish is an online tool that allows you to easily create visualizations; you can choose from many different types and it generates different output formats. The tool also allows you to create stories, which are an animated sequence of visualizations, where it is possible to intersperse transparencies with images, text, etc.

Once we have accessed the service, Flourish allows us to choose from a catalog of typical visualizations, using a visual editor that allows us to edit the data directly, as in a spreadsheet, and to adjust the parameters of each visualization according to the data entered. The results can be exported in different formats, either as an HTML page or as a static image.

flourish blog

Like the previous chart, this one allows you to include data from multiple elections. Here, too, 2019 results could be added by copying the values from the «Current data» table to the «Historic data» table and then replacing the already old «Current data» values with the new ones.

The map above shows the 2014 results. To update and customize the map, just enter the associated data table and change the name of the parties in each country. In this post you can learn more about our map template and how it works.

To use another example from the European Parliament: one of the most confusing and difficult things to explain to the reader is how each national party fits into broader European parliamentary groups. To solve this challenge, we have created a hierarchical chart showing each party and its corresponding grouping. This visualization could be used to show the place of each formation within the overall European picture, to let readers explore the party structure on their own, or to edit it to include only parties from particular countries.

how to make graphics in flourish

This visualization tool allows you to create graphs, maps and interactive stories online. It is based on a set of basic principles that are intended to facilitate the work for any user:

This type of chart shows the change of a range or its evolution over a certain time. This visualization is widely used to show the data of any type of competition or «race»: candidates in an election, soccer teams in a competition, for example. It graphs in two modes and allows animations between the two: a line graph that plots the raw values and an evolution graph that calculates and plots the ranges of this data.

To use this chart your data should contain one column with region names and one or more columns with values. The region names should match the preloaded example data.

A network of linked points as a node diagram. To achieve this linkage, the dataset must have at least two columns with links. Each row specifies the points (to be shown as circles) that are linked together (via a line). A third column can be included to be used to define the width of the link.