Visualisation of thematic trends in funding wins 360Giving challenge
Melanie May | 25 September 2018 | News
A visualisation of the thematic trends in funding has won the 360Giving Data Visualisation Challenge.
The competition launched earlier this year, run by 360Giving and funded by the Big Lottery Fund. It offered cash prizes for new, creative uses of the 360Giving open dataset, which provides information on over 290,000 grants worth £24 billion from 92 funders including the Big Lottery Fund, Comic Relief and the Wellcome Trust.
Announced on 21 September, data visualisation engineer from Barcelona, Xavi Gimenez won the first prize of £6,000 for using a type of natural language processing to discover the funders of hidden themes from the documents and structured data available via 360Giving’s GrantNav platform about grants made since 1998.
Thanks to all who came along to #DataVizAwards on Friday – read the story including list of winners (@JoeFHall @TomJNeill @CathSleeman @suninthasky @olliecarrington @JPVSilva88 @VictriaVic & @xavigimenez) #diggingthedata https://t.co/795j2ffm02 pic.twitter.com/s4vnhsKjh7
— 360Giving (@360Giving) September 24, 2018
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The second prize of £4,000 went to Victòria Oliveres for her From funder to user visualisation, which mapped grants to user-led organisations, while the third prize of £2,000 was awarded to Funding trends by Oliver Carrington and João Silva, which is an interactive web app visualising data from 360Giving and the Charity Commission to present key funding trends and a dedicated dashboard for each of over 70 funders.
The fourth prize of £750 went to Suraj Vadgama’s Slice & Dice: a tool to explore GrantNav searches visually. A Special Judges Award, and two Creative Mentions also received prizes of £2,000 and £750 respectively, while the remaining 28 entries received were awarded between £100 and £500 for their work.
Will Perrin, Chair of the judging panel, said:
“Xavi’s beautiful visualisation allows you to leap right into large complex datasets and understand what’s been funded. Underneath the interactive graphics lies some excellent coding and Xavi’s talent demonstrates the power of open grants data.”
Judge Lucy Bernholz, Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab and author, added:
“From forests of grantmakers to emoji-based trend analysis, the 360Giving data visualisation challenge reveals a creative public interest in even the most basic financial data on philanthropy. Applicants tried many things from topic modeling to scissors and paste to communicate the size, reach, age and interests of grantmakers in the UK. A great start – I hope this visualisation challenge successfully provokes more questions, more data and more engagement with the information.”
Main image: from Xavi Gimenez’s winning entry.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.