Spreadsheets and raw data may appeal to accountants, but the typical person is not cognitively tuned to acquire data by such methods. Data visualization and information design are critical to the modern era. Scholars such as Edward Tufte
For a purely demo project, I wanted to help the learners engage with the data. I found a data set of licensure requirements for acupuncture practitioners in the United States. I could have also picked a data set from the new data.gov. I took the table based information and converted it to XML to be read into a flash project.
Rather than display the data as a table, I envisioned a map of the United States like the CNN "magic wall". I knew of the awesome Degrafa library for Actionscript/Flex and on their website they had a demo section with exactly the sort of map I was looking for. Based on their demo source code, I was able to create an interactive map of the data set I found.
Click on the map to see the Flash project in a new window
