Ask HN: How much does a concept map like this cost?

4 points·giltleaf··3 comments

I'm working with an organization that's looking to start actually doing data visualization (which, believe me, is a pretty big step). How much would something like this cost and where would I look to get someone to do it?

http://www.findtheconversation.com/concept-map/

http://mbostock.github.io/d3/talk/20111116/bundle.html

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/uberdata/

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GIS (geographic information systems) is all about data visualization, mostly via maps but not exclusively. I would start off by looking for someone calling themselves a "data scientist" or listing GIS in their resume/skill sets.

I have no idea what it would cost. Though if you are just starting out, you probably do not need anything as complicated as the beautiful examples you posted. Someone good with an Excel spreadsheet and its inherent graphing capabilities could probably get you started.

Good data visualization is very much about GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you don't know what questions to ask and why you are visualizing it, beautiful graphics won't fix anything.

Best of luck.

For anyone interested, here is the source for that second one: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/gh-pages/talk/20111116/b...

and the data: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/gh-pages/talk/20111116/f...

The third one is from github as well.

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