Visible Certainty - The Verifiable.com Blog

auto-updated data feeds + data joining + calculated variables == power

Jason Y. whipped up a fascinating chart this afternoon that shows off the power of our new data feeds when combined with joined data and calculated variables.

He started with a data set of the monthly closing price of the S&P 500 Index.  Then he joined that with another monthly data set of the 10-year Treasury yield.  Then he created two new calculated variable series representing the monthly change in each (which is not explicit in the original data).

Finally, he plotted them together on the X and Y axes of a point chart, in the typical “four-quadrant” style, annotated some interesting outliers, and colored all the data by date.

Total time spent: 30 minutes.

It’s interesting data, well-visualized.

- Peter C., Verifiable.com

PS: He also made this small-multiple view of the same data.

New auto-update capability for data on Verifiable!

Starting today, a number of our public data sets will be automatically updated from the source, as new data is published.  Examples include the rich unemployment data sets from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Price Index data.  We’ll be adding more all the time, each one tagged with “auto-updated” for easy search.  If you want time series data that we aren’t yet supporting, please let us know.

Best yet, preexisting visualizations incorporate this new data automatically.  And in some cases, new old data—for example, we extended some of the unemployment data back to 1954.

In general we avoid modifying the appearance of existing visualizations whenever we add or change features, but in this case we made an exception since the additional data should be a major improvement.  You also should’ve received an email from us warning you of any changes to your visualizations (please let us know if we missed you).

We encourage you all to log in and experiment with the latest data.  And if you’d like to your visualization to show only a fixed period, you can simply add a filter restricting the dates you see, as before.

We hope you enjoy the new functionality.  Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

-Peter C., Verifiable.com

New Feature: Custom Colors

One of our most requested features has been the ability to assign custom colors to chart variables.

Although our default color palate has been carefully chosen to allow the maximum number of distinct variables (a future blog post in and of itself), our assignments won’t always correspond to the specific colors naturally associated with certain data, or may not match your personal or organizational aesthetic.

To choose your own color for a data series, just right-click on any data point in the series and select “Choose Series Color”.

For example, our popular chart of Party Affiliation By Religious Tradition can now be improved by using traditional party colors (red and blue), with lighter shades for “leaning”.  Below are before and after images (click through for the interactive charts).

Before:

After:

- Peter C., Verifiable.com