Welcome to the Node Mapper wiki. In this guide you will find answers about the tool and how to use it step by step.

1. What is Node Mapper?
2. What problem does it solve?
3. What is the goal of this?
4. Who is this for?
5. What is it for and what it is not for?
6. How can you use it?

Node Mapper is a easy to use tool that allows you to add data in a Google Spreadsheet template and build simple visualizations of networks without coding, to publish or embed them in your website.

Building network graph visualizations for storytelling requires skillful developers, designers and resources that not all newsrooms and civic organizations have access to.

This is something that we learned at Poderopedia.org - a international data journalism platform and community that maps who is who in business and politics to show conflicts of interest and make your reporting easier -, from speaking and working with journalists and activists from small and medium organizations in Latin America, the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia, all of which are driven by pressing investigative questions in pursue of change.

Usually their reporting and stories include finding out who is connected to whom or to which organization and in which way in order to understand hidden relations that can unlock newsworthy meanings of apparently unrelated events.

Visualizing that is powerful. It helps the story. And it should be easier, faster and less complicated for people who don`t know how to code.

We built Node Mapper for those users, so they can go from a spreadsheet to a network graph visualization in less than 15 minutes*.

The goal of Node Mapper is to expand and democratize the use of data to do visual storytelling, by allowing people and organizations, that don`t have access to programmers, to create and publish network graph visualizations in a fast and simple way. This can lower the entry barrier to the use of this type of tools. It may also help people become “network visualization” savvy to learn the basic concepts to grow from here to more complex projects and tools.

• Journalist and citizens that have questions, find the answers and publish stories with their findings in the Internet.
• Journalist who do written pieces that have to do with connections (conflicts of interest, corruption, family ties, technology trends, funding for startups, etc.) and don`t have coding skills or access to work with a programmer.
• Citizens who are active on civic media and care about their communities so they report on the issues that affect them and publish stories or launch campaigns about those issues (a energy company that is messing up with the environment, a major that is working too close with a lobbyist and it`s letting a real state contractor build a building that impacts on the neighborhood, etc.)

• Visualize and share their findings about a topic with their communities in a easy fast way.
• Build and publish visualizations of network graphs without the aid of a programmer and do it on deadline.
• Use visualizations of network graphs as the center piece of a story and include other contents about the network.
• Use visualizations of networks of connections as a secondary piece in a story to provide visual context and understanding of what they are writing about
• Have a step by step guide that helps them build and publish a visualization of network graphs. Hopefully with examples templates where they can replace the example information. Maybe some customization but they are ok with something simple with 1 or 2 options.
• Visualize networks with less than 100 nodes, being 20 to 30 nodes the average.
• Don`t want to use the tool for forensic analysis
• Users are not interested in displaying Big Data. No hairballs.

Yes. A lot. In the research stage for Node Mapper we reviewed many awesome tools for network graph visualization and showed them to reporters and civic advocates, who felt in general intimidated by the amount of choices provided by the tools. We conducted interviews with more than 50 people from newsrooms, Academia and civic organizations. We also checked which are the charting and timeline tools most used by journalist in small and medium newsrooms with tight budgets, to find a pattern: The most used tools include a template, a step by step guide and some basic customization options.

This tool has some end user assumptions:

• You know what you want to show as a network visualization.
• You want to publish a network visualization, not analyze it.
• You have a story to tell. Including a network visualization can give your story more depth and visual context.
• It`s designed for small network graphs (20 to 30 nodes average, around 100 nodes max. for clarity).

You

• Open the spreadsheet template
• Add data into the spreadsheet template
• Publish the spreadsheet to the web
• Copy the url of the published spreadsheet
• Paste the url in the url field of the Node Mapper page
• Click on load data and choose network settings
• Visualize network and save it
• Copy the url of the network visualization and share it with others or
• Copy the embed code and paste it in your website