<em>This tutorial is written by Gregor Aisch, visualization architect and interactive news developer, based on his workshop, Data visualisation, maps and timelines on a shoestring. The workshop is part of the School of Data Journalism 2013 at the International Journalism Festival.</em>

Pre-requisites

1. Download and install Tableau Public. By now there is only a Windows version available.
2. Download the dataset eurostat-youth.csv

Loading a CSV file

1. Click Open data to open the data import window. From the list on the left pick Text File and select eurostat-youth.csv. Make sure that Field separator is set to "Comma". Click OK to proceed.

2. Note: if this step fails with an error message, try changing your system region to English in Windows control panel (see screenshot). It seems that Tableau has cannot comma-separated values if comma is set as decimal separator for numbers in the system settings.
3. Tableau now lists all the columns of the table in the data panel on the left. The columns are classified into Dimensions and Measures.

4. The dataset contains the following columns (all data is 2011 and aggregated on NUTS-2 level):

• secondary_edu: percentage of population with secondary education
• youth_unemployed: percentage of people that aged between 18 and 24, unemployed and do not participate in education or training.
• unemployed_15_24M: percentage of unemployed males between 15 and 24.
• unemployed_15_24F: percentage of unemployed females between 15 and 24.

Analysing a dataset

Now we are going to analyze the dataset using Tableau.

1. Now drag the field youth_unemployed from Measures to Columns. Then drag secondary_edu to Rows.

2. As you see Tableau computes the sums of the columns instead of plotting the individual values. To fix this we need to right-click the green fields and select Dimension.

3. If both fields are set to be treated as dimensions you should see a scatterplot like shown in the following screenshot. You can see that there is a negative correlation between education and youth unemployment.

4. Now drag the field country from Dimensions to Color to color the plot symbols by country. You can also drag the country to Shape to change the icon.

5. Add the fields country and geo_name to the Detail mark to include that piece of information in the tooltips.
6. Now you can use the color legend and quick filters to highlight and hide certain countries.
7. Focus on Turkey
8. Plotting unemployment by gender

Bonus: creating a map with Tableau

1. Now we can create a map easily: select the dimension lat and lon together with the measure count (while holding the Ctrl key) and click on Show Me to expand the list of suggested visualizations. Then click on the icon of the map with the blue circles. Click on Show Me again to hide the panel.

1. Now you should already see the complete table. Tableau is smart enough to use the square roots of the counts for the circles radii automatically, so we don't have to care about this.
2. You can make the circles transparent by clicking on Color in the panel Marks and moving the transparency slider. To change the size of the circles, click on Size and adjust the slider.
3. Now drag the field name to the Mark Label to add the city names as labels to the map.

<em>Note</em>: The final steps of this tutorial are going to be added in the coming days.&nbsp;

This is the second of the tutorials from the hands-on visualisation session from Gregor Aisch at the School of Data Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. In this tutorial we will create a simple map of the Tour de France stations of the last 100 years.

Pre-requirements

1. Install and configure QGIS.

1. Install from http://qgis.org. On most systems there should be a one-click installer that guides you through the process.

2. We need to install the following handy plugins:

• Add Delimited Text Layer allows us to read and plot points from a CSV file.

• Edit Any Layer allows us to easily edit CSV layers

1. In menu click Plugins > Fetch Python Plugins. In the appearing dialog type in edit any in the the filter box to narrow down the list:

2. Select the plugin and click Install/upgrade plugin. Repeat the same for Add Delimited Text Layer.

1. Download country shapefile from naturalearthdata.com. We are looking for ne_50m_admin_0_countries.

2. Download our sample dataset from http://vis4.net/perugia13/tour-de-france.csv.

Creating the base map layer

1. Click Layer > Add Vector Layer > Browse and select the file 50m_admin_0_countries.shp. That’s the shapefile containing the borders of all countries. Click Open to add finally it to the map.

2. Filter for countries with ISO code of France. Right-click on the layer and select Query from its context menu. In the text box SQL where clause enter the text: ISO_A3 = ‘FRA’. Make sure to use single-quotes as double-quotes are reserved for addressing column names. Click OK to apply the filter.

3. Zoom to Metropolitan France. You can simply use the Zoom In tool

   and draw a rectangle around France.

4. You might have noticed by now that France looks rather compressed. That is because by default QGIS is using the Plate Carree projection (nerdily referred to by its EPSG code EPSG:4326). You can change the projection by clicking the following icon in the lower right of the window:

5. In the opening dialog activate the checkbox next to “Enable ‘on the fly’ CRS transformation”. Then in the filter text field enter France to search for map projection spezialized for France. For instance you can pick ED50 / France EuroLambert. Click OK to activate the projection.

6. Let’s change the default styling. Again, right-click the layer and select Properties. The next dialog should be opened with the Style tab selected by default. Click the button Change… to change the layer style.

7. Now we are going to disable the filling by selecting No Brush in Fill style drop-down. Change the border color to red and increase the border width to 1. Click OK to apply the styling.

8. By now the resulting map should look like this:

Adding the Tour de France stations

1. Add delimited layer (CSV of tour de france stations). Click Layer > Add Delimited Text Layer. (If this option is not available, please make sure you installed the corresponding plugin in the first step.) Then click Browse… and select the file tour-de-france.csv that we downloaded previously.

2. QGIS is smart enough to recognize the format of the CSV file, and it even detects that the columns named lat and lon probably contain the map coordinates. All we need to do is to click OK.

3. Now QGIS will ask you in what reference system (=projection) the provided coordinates are given. In most cases you will need to pick WGS 84 or EPSG:4326. Just type 4326 in the filter box and select WGS 84. Click OK to finish.



4. Now our map contains all the locations of Tour de France stations:



5. Now we are going to size the stations according to how often they have been part of the tour. Right click the layer tour-de-france and select Properties in the context menu.

6. Change the value in the Size field to a lower value such as 0,5.



7. Now click Advanced > Size scale field > count to let QGIS use the values in the column count as radius for the symbols.

8. 

   You might also want to make the symbols more transparent by moving the Transparency slider to 50%.
   Your map should now look like this:



9. Since we must always size symbols by area, and not radius, we now need to correct our map. As the area of circles depends grows proportionally with the square of the radius, we need to compute the square roots of the counts to get proper radii.

10. Usually you could have done this already during the data preparation phase and could simply stored another column in the CSV file. Also you can just load the CSV into a spreadsheet tool like Excel and add a new column with the square roots of the counts. However, you can also do this in QGIS using the Edit Any Layer plugin.



11. In the menu Plugins select Edit Any Layer > Create Editable Layer. Select tour-de-france as input layer and chose a name for the output layer. I will simply use tour-de-france-2 here. Click OK to proceed.

12. You will be asked for the coordinate system again. WGS84 should be selected by default so simply clicking OKshould work.

13. Now open the attribute table by right-clicking the new layer and selecting Open Attribute Table in the context menu. You will now see all the data stored in the CSV. Activate editing mode by clicking on the little blue pencil icon (see screenshot). Then open the field calculator by clicking on the little calculator icon.



14. Make sure that Create a new field is checked and enter a meaningful name for the new column, e.g. radius. As the square roots are going to be decimal numbers, select Decimal number (real) as Output field type. Finally enter the following formula into the Expression text field: sqrt(count). The dialog should now look like shown in the following screenshot. Click OK to proceed.



15. Back in the attribute table you can take a look at the new column (you may have to scroll the table to the right). Now deactivate editing mode by clicking on the blue pencil icon again. QGIS will ask you if you agree to save the changes. Click Save, and Close the attribute table.

16. Now hide the layer tour-de-france that we created in step 2 by deactivating its checkbox in the layer window on the left. Now we repeat the second step with the new layer (tour-de-france-2), but instead of count we will pick the column radius for sizing the symbols.

17. If you like, change the color to blue and set the transparency to 50%. Finally the map should look like this:

Exporting to PDF

In the last section we are going to export our map to PDF.

1. In the menu click File > New Print Composer. The print composer allows us to set up a print layout with our map. Initially the page is empty, but we are going to change this by clicking the icon for Add new map (1) and dragging a rectangle onto the page (2):



2. Optionally you can disable the black frame by disabling the checkbox General options > Show frame in the panel on the right.

3. Now in the menu click on File > Export as PDF… to finally save the map as PDF. You can now open the map in other graphic tools such as Illustrator to do some fine tuning (adding title, labels etc).

<em>By Gregor Aisch, visualization architect and interactive news developer, based on his workshop, Data visualisation, maps and timelines on a shoestring. The workshop is part of the School of Data Journalism 2013 at the International Journalism Festival.</em>


This tutorial goes through the basic process of creating simple, embeddable charts using Datawrapper.

Preparing the Dataset

1. Go to the Eurostat website and download the dataset Unemployment rate by sex and age groups – monthly average as Excel spreadsheet. You can also directly download the file from here.
2. We now need to clean the spreadsheet. Make a copy the active sheet to keep the original sheet for reference. Now remove the header and footer rows so that GEO/TIME is stored in the first cell (A1).
3. It's a good idea to limit the number of shown entries to something around ten or fiveteen, since otherwise the chart would be cluttered up too much. Our story will be about how Europe is divided according to the unemployment rate, so I decided to remove anything but the top-3 and bottom-3 countries plus some reference countries of interest in between. The final dataset contains the countries: Greece, Spain, Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus, France, United Kingdom, Norway, Austria, Germany.
4. Let's also try to keep the labels short. For Germany we can remove the appendix "(until 1990 former territory of the FRG)", since it wouldn't fit in out chart.
5. This is how the final dataset looks like in OpenOffice Calc

Loading the Data into Datawrapper

1. Now, to load the dataset into Datawrapper you can simply copy and paste it. In your spreadsheet software look for the Select All function (e.g. Edit > Select All in OpenOffice).
2. Copy the data into the clipboard by either selecting Edit > Copy from the menu or pressing Ctrl + C (for Copy) on your keyboard.
3. Go to datawrapper.de and click the link Create A New Chart. You can do this either being logged in or as guest. If you create the chart as guest, you can add it to your collection later by signing up for free.
4. Now paste the data into the big text area in Datawrapper. Click Upload and continue to proceed to the next step.

Check and Describe the Data

1. Check if the data has been recognized correctly. Things to check for are the number format (in our example the decimal separator , has been replaced with .). Also check wether the row and column headers have been recognized.
2. Change number format to one decimals after point to ensure the data is formatted according to your selected language (e.g. decimal comma for France).
3. Now provide information about the data source. The data has been published by Eurostat. Provide the link to the dataset as well. This information will be displayed along with the published charts, so readers can trace back the path to the source themselves.

4. Click Visualize to proceed to the next step.

Selecting a Visualization

1. Time series are best represented using line charts, so click on the icon for line chart to select this visualization.
2. Give the chart a title that explains both what the readers are seeing in the chart and why they should care about it. A title like "Youth unemployment rates in Europe" only answers half of the question. A better title would be"Youth unemployment divides Europe" or "Youth unemployment on record high in Greece and Spain"
3. In the introduction line we should clarify what exactly is shown in the chart. Click Introduction and type "Seasonally adjusted unemployment rates of under 25 aged". Of course you can also provide more details about the story.
4. Now highlight the data series that are most important for telling the story. The idea is to let one or two countries really pop out of the chart, and attract the readers attention immediately. Click Highlight and select Greece and Spain from the list. You might also want to include your own country for reference.
5. Activate direct labeling to make it easier to read the chart. Also, since our data is already widely distributed, we can force the extension of the vertical axis to the zero-baseline.
6. We can let the colors support the story by choosing appropriate colors. First, click on the orange field to select it as base color. Then click on define custom colors and pick red for high unemployment countries Greece and Spain. For countries with low youth unemployment such as Germany, Norway and Austria we can pick a green, or even better, a blue tone (to respect the color blind). Now the resulting chart should look like this:

7. Click Publish to proceed to the last step.

Publishing the Visualization

1. Now a copy of the chart is being pushed to the content delivery network Amazon S3, which ensures that it loads fast under high traffic.
2. Meanwhile you can already copy the embed code and paste it into your newsrooms CMS to include it in the related news article – just like you would do with a Youtube video.

 


Further tutorials can be found on the Datawrapper <a href="http://docs.datawrapper.de/en/tutorial/">website</a>.&nbsp;