Andrew Walkinshaw of Timetric on 'numbers that vary against time' at #newsinnovation
by Martin Belam, 14 July 2009
....or, the exponential growth in the price of a cheese sandwich.
"The really interesting thing is not what these numbers are now, but what they used to be and what they are going to be."
At the London News Innovation Unconference on Friday I recorded some video clips of the presentations. This is some footage of Andrew Walkinshaw of Timetric. The opening part of Andrew's presentation was about how Timetric is mapping 'numbers that vary against time', and the work that they have done with The Guardian on the Data Blog.
Andrew was presenting about 'time series', and I was presenting about 'the tyranny of chronology', and we just about managed to avoid coming to blows about the importance of time when we met each other ;-)
Next...
Later this week I'll have more notes and video clips from the News Innovation day at NESTA.
Thank you for recording this, and for the sympathetic editing :) Mind if we pinch it for our blog?
Please do, Andrew, feel free.
I have to say, Many Eyes produces much better graphs than Timetric. Plus Many Eyes have many more types of graphs.
I wonder what Timetric’s niche will be……But for the adventurous or skilled, this might be something to explore, because Timetric offers an API to let you interact with the site in interesting ways.
One important thing that Timetric has that Many Eyes doesn't is a focus on UK data.
Alex: compared to ManyEyes we're much more about the API, the formula-based modelling, and the search/data discovery aspects - in other words, the metadata management - than we are about purely data visualization. It's our API which allows people to build things like the custom MP-expenses dashboard on the Guardian's Datablog, or things like Twilight (our Twitter meter: twilight.timetric.com).
That's really not a knock on ManyEyes - it's tremendously impressive: we just have different emphases, and we're aiming at being more of a platform than ManyEyes are.
He talks about cheese sandwiches being 3 and a half pence in the seventies and though I don't remember that I do remember mars bars being 10p, maybe he should've talked about that instead because now I cannot find them for less than 60p lol