Flourish Connections Globe Visualizer Tutorial

This is a tutorial for the tool Flourish. Flourish is a visualization tool that allows you to create beautiful charts, maps, and interactive content fast. There is no coding required for using this tool. This tool is useful for Digital Arts and Humanities work because it enables story telling through data and is very accessible towards the mass audiences.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a this interactive global map visualization of from Tate’s Birth and Death Places of Non-UK Artists born between 1900-1919 dataset. We are going to be working with Flourish’s Connections globe visualizer.

Here’s a preview on what you’re going to be able to accomplish after following this tutorial.

Steps:

1. Log in to Flourish.studio.
2. And on the top left corner, select “New visualization”.
3. Scroll down until you find “Connections globe”, and select “Satellite”.
4. You’ll instantly be given a default visualization on the Preview tab.
5. On the top center, switch to the Data tab. The first tab is the Values tab. Upload the “Names and Places” dataset, after exporting it as a .csv from the sheet, by clicking “Upload data”. Put the placeOfBirth (B) as the Source location, placeOfDeath (C) as the Destination location, and name (A) as Filter 1.
   
6. Now, still on the Data tab, switch to from Values to Locations. Upload the “Location” dataset, after exporting it as a .csv from the sheet, by clicking “Upload data”. Put location (A) as Location code and Location name, latitude (B) as Latitude, and longitude (C) as Longitude.
7. Now go back to the Preview tab. On the right hand side, you can customize the way you visualize. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will keep it simple. For the Design menu, set the colors of the Arrows and its highlight is on the orange-yellow spectrum, the accent gray, the gradient opacity is 0.85, and have the rest in its default settings. For the Header menu, set the title as “Birth and Death Places of Artists”, and the subtitle as “Non UK Artists b. from 1900-1919”.
   
8. And viola! You got yourself an awesome globe visualization of Tate’s Birth and Death Places of Non-UK Artists born between 1900-1919. Here, you can pick the artists and see where was their birthplace (the location before the arrow) and their place of death (the location after the arrow). To learn more about how I got cleaned the original dataset, you can read it on my Midterm blog.

Two further resources:
1. Flourish’s own help center.
2. A more advanced tutorial on Flourish on YouTube.