Creating Technology for Social Change

Data Therapy Workshop Followup

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As part of our Data Therapy project, we just ran two workshops to help build capacity within small community organizations to understand and creatively present their data. We were able to accommodate about 25 people in our training space, and hope to help more of those that were on the waitlist in the future. These workshops were run in collaboration with the Regional Center for Healthy Communities, whose training needs assessment has spurred these workshops and where I’ve run them for the last few years. This blog post includes some follow-up information for attendees to those workshops, but may be interesting for other people too!

For those of you that did attend, here are some references for the tools and ideas that we talked about.

  • Prezi: Present content in a way that more closely models how presenters and audiences understand things, unlike PowerPoint
  • Tagxedo, Wordle: Create a picture out of a large body of text, where the size of each word is determined by the number of times that word is used in the text
  • Jing: Make narrated videos of your visualizations, and mark up screenshots with text and arrows
  • BatchGeo: Quickly go from a spreadsheet of addresses to a map, including options to aggregate content by some field of your data
  • ComicLife, SuperLame: Create comic strips by adding talking bubbles to your photos
  • Handmade Visualizations: Use regular craft tools to bring your data representation back into the real world
  • ColorBrewer2: Pick color palettes appropriately based on the type of data you are showing (then use those colors in Excel)
  • Google Fusion Tables: Upload your data in spreadsheet form and visualize it in lots of different ways
  • Many Eyes: Upload your data and create lots of different types of interactive visualizations of it
  • Visualizing Information for Advocacy: Guide to creating info-graphics to support activism

Here are the two Prezi presentation I used at the workshop. These aren’t designed to live on their own without me narrating them, but I’ll include them here in case you want them as a reference for something.