Visualization Tools Added to "Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy" an Open Access E-Journal
ProQuest’s peer-reviewed, open access e-journal Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy (SSPP) is introducing new visualization tools that make it easier for researchers to observe, compare, and manipulate the vast amounts of data being generated by the sustainability community. SSPP’s “Featured Datasets” are designed to reveal relationships between variables and give access to individual data elements.
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The objective of Featured Datasets is to make it easy for readers, researchers, and potential authors to better understand and investigate key data underlying specific sustainability issues. SSPP editors first identify relevant public datasets, then restructure and reformat the data to permit visualization and access by the journal’s readers. Each Featured Dataset – and its raw data – will be a permanent part of the Researcher’s Toolkit section of the SSPP e-journal, a highly valued component that provides the research and policy-making community with free data discovery resources and interactive analysis capabilities (sspp.proquest.com/toolkit/home.html).
The first Featured Dataset utilizes a Motion Chart visualization tool (developed using Google Visualization API), which offers an interactive way to discover and visualize data by plotting up to four variables over time. This featured dataset, Recession Reduces Gridlock — Congestion Data for U.S. Urban Areas, mashes data from the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) with unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A second Motion Chart presents additional TTI data in which, fourteen variables can be analyzed relating to the costs for automobile use, with further implications for Smart Growth and transportation policy.
Hat Tip and Thanks: Peter Suber/Open Access Tracking Project
Filed under: Data Files, News, Open Access, Publishing, Resources

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.