Visualise Data

Northwestern University Knight Lab is a community of designers, developers, students, and educators working on experiments designed to push journalism into new spaces. Out of this collaboration have come a suite of tools for creating highly interactive, beautiful representations of data. The suite includes JuxtaposeJS, a tool for juxtaposing changes in two images over time, SoundciteJS, in which audio can be embedded into a paragraph of text, StorymapJS, a clean, annotated map interface for storytelling, and TimelineJS, a timeline creator which beautifully integrates audio-visual data into its interactive format.

This webpage provides a list of useful tools for visualising data sets for those with and without coding skills. Most of the tools listed have basic, free accounts however the fact that usability is often greatly increased by monthly subscription fees is a drawback. However, the list does provide a good overview of what is available and it's likely that if you're looking for a simple way to represent your data, you'll find something useful - either by using the tools to create a visualisation, or simply looking through the examples to find inspiration to go off and create your own.

This discussion paper produced by the United Nations Development Programme discusses various innovations that are occurring in M&E, and the advantages and disadvantages of these methods.

This guide addresses the issue of ensuring that evaluation findings are used by stakeholders. It guides readers through the process of creating effective evaluation reports, focusing on the key considerations that need to be taken into account, the essential elements of reports, the importance of dissemination, and offers tools and resources to help with this task. Although created with assist evaluators of heart disease and stroke prevention activities in mind, this guide will be useful for program managers, evaluators and other stakeholders who wish to identify appropriate evaluation products, effectively communicate findings, and find effective dissemination efforts. 

Stephanie Evergreen (Evergreen Data) and Ann K. Emery have put together this handy checklist of best practice in creating strong, visually engaging graphs for data visualisation. It was specifically compiled with evaluation practitioners in mind and covers a range of areas such as the text, arrangement and colours in a graph.

This whitepaper, by Noah Iliinsky, IBM Visualisation Expert, covers the various visual properties of data visualisation and how to appropriately apply them to various types of data.