Socioscope - A visual analytics platform for open socioeconomic data Full text

George Papastefanatos, Stavros Maroulis
Chapter in Book “Transformations of Protest in Greece”, Stathopoulou, T (ed.), Papazisis publishers & NCSR 2019
2019
Book
Abstract. Data visualization techniques have proven essential in Social Scienc-es, especially nowadays that the increasing volume and diversity of the availa-ble data make hard for people to make sense of it. The provision of interactive data exploration and visualization tools greatly assists social scientists and in general non-expert users, such as journalists, policy and opinion makers in pro-ducing value from this plethora of data. In this article, we discuss a data prepa-ration methodology for the interactive visualization of social data and present Socioscope, a web-based visual analytics platform that allows the user to browse in a visual way various sets of social and political data related to Greece. Users can filter the data through faceted browsing and keyword search, and explore the results in a variety of visualizations for each different type of data, such as charts for numerical data, timelines for temporal data and choro-pleth and point maps for geographical data. Data exploration and analysis are further facilitated by such features as hierarchical representation of different levels of aggregation in charts and the ability to compare data from different da-tasets in the same visualization. Socioscope is presented focusing on the specif-ic case of the PROMAP dataset, which contains data regarding the social mobi-lization in Greece between 1996 and 2015, and extracted via a semi-automatic way from the digital archives of two Greek newspapers.