Irish Health Centres
0The HSE posted two new datasets to Open Data Ireland and I wanted to determine how quickly and effectively these might be visualised. In this case I used CartoDB and created a hexagonal data map. Interesting. A few immediate findings.
Why Hexagons? … It all goes back to the most recent UK general election – I tweeted that it seemed to be the election where the hexagon became de riguer – where all the mainstream media outlets were suddenly seized with the novelty pf the hexagon. In seriousness, it raised an interest in exploring the usefulness of the hexagon as a datavis tool. What does it afford? Seemingly a unique middle ground between pure cartesian spatiality and useful tesseract chart. It may well be rather subjective, but this exercise did yield some substantiation.
The process for this one is simple: download the CSV file from data.gov.ie, do a wee bit of kludging and send the resulting dataset to CartoDB. CDB requires a little twerking, but it is nicely GUI driven wizardry and the result can be inserted into your sharing venue of choice. In this case, a quick burn on the QUBDH blog.
Are hexagons a useful visualisation tool for you?