Today we went over how we would work on our next data visualization project, and watched many videos on visual data programs like visual.ly and tableau.
Three things I learned...
1. Visual.ly is a proprietary software. There are some free demos and templates on their website to have a full infographic made costs $999+, though they can make presentations and even interactive infographics.
2. Tableau is a more spreadsheet style visual tool. It offers drag and drop functionality as well. They offer a free trial but are also in the business of selling their full software for $999+. Although, they offer free 1-year licenses to students who wish to use their product: http://www.tableausoftware.com/academic/students
3. explore.data.gov has a lot of interactive data sets including maps, charts, calendars, etc. Many of the offerings however are data sets or links to external data sets.
Update on my projects...
For my short term of further understanding python, I've read further into chapter 6 in "Exploring Python" and it goes on to explain For loops, and how/why you might use them to read in files. Also explained is recovery from exceptions. On page 106 an example is given on how to sort a file, which involves try/exception in case a file cannot be opened (if it doesn't exist etc) and what to do if that happens, then it merges the files. The example also shows the defs needed to sort such as mergeTwoIntoOne, which utilizes the .pop and .append tools. Further on in this chapter is reading from URLs which will probably be helpful for my long term goal.