Methods &amp; Skills

Methods & Skills

Data visualisation

ZSI offers web-based interactive data visualisations for visual analytics and user-centred data exploration.

Today’s policy-makers and analysts can rely on increasing amounts of available data (open data, big data, etc.) for evidence-based policy formulation and evaluation. With the improved data availability, the complexity of data analyses also increases. While this seems to be mainly the analysts’ concern, users of the results (ministries, agencies, researchers, etc.) are also affected. As more data becomes available, the task of integrating it and drawing meaningful conclusions becomes more challenging. It is the analysts’ task to facilitate the interpretation and full exploitation of results.

Delivering on this challenge, ZSI is developing customized approaches to facilitate data and results interpretation. We combine our strong track record in qualitative methods and stakeholder inclusion processes with cutting edge interactive data visualisations. The visualisations allow users to explore complex sets of data following their own priorities. Through this, we make data available at the depth a specific user requires, and allow them to draw own additional conclusions, extract context information, etc. As such, the visualisations are a tool to combine the analysts’ insights with the users’ interpretive abilities and context knowledge. In addition, they provide exciting ways of presenting results to a variety of publics – while our visualisations always serve a purpose, they are also allowed to look good.

We offer

Standard and customized, javascript-based interactive data visualisations for web publishing and user-centered visual analytics
User-centred data exploration tools
Dynamic and interactive versions of basic chart types (bar chart, line chart, pie chart, etc.)
Web-based presentation techniques including interactive charts
Connection of an R-based data backend with a javascript-based interactive visualisation frontend (for in-house analyses or public dissemination)

Example visualisations

Up-to-date examples can be found on our visualisation.zsi.at blog.
Other examples include

Undirected geomapped networks over time (Social network analysis of international co-authorship relations; works best in Chrome and Firefox browsers)
Hierarchical data (Co-authored publications in specific fields of science)
Tree maps (used for the conceptualisation of impact monitoring frameworks)
Javascript-based presentations, running in any modern browser and including interactive charts (example from the SEA-EU-NET project)

References/ Contracting Authorities:

Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft
European Commission (Framework Programme 7 and Horizon 2020)

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