Overview

Calypso is StateBook's visualization API based in JavaScript.  Calypso easily displays StateBook data on your website using views such as tables, charts, graphs, and maps. These visualizations are fully interactive, allowing your users to choose between multiple topics, views, geographies, time periods, data categories, and metrics. Very little development experience is needed to integrate the API into your website.  With just a few lines of code, a wealth of data can be at your users' fingertips. 

While the API allows you to display single tables, charts, graphs, or maps that target a very specific topic, the API is more commonly used let the user choose between hundreds of topics and views.  The API can provide automatic navigation using a series of pulldown menus.  These visualizations can also be organized into dashboards depending on the amount of room available on the webpage.  

Examples 

As the website developer, you can request an individual view such as a table, chart, graph, or map. A view would visualize a single topic such as a five-year chart with US Census ACS demographic data on age ranges. All of these views are highly interactive, with options to drill down through hierarchical data, scroll or drill down through larger sets of data, and hover over chart components to see additional data points and footnotes.

Here are some examples of views available in Calypso.

 

Tables

Tables are invaluable for looking at the raw data.  Tables can be configured, sorted, transposed, printed, and downloaded.

 

Charts

Charts allow users to quickly visualize and compare data.  Charts can be configured, printed, and downloaded.

 

Column charts can easily show data over time as well.

 

Different chart styles can help visualize data in different ways.

 

Graphs

Graphs are especially useful for visualizing data over time.

 

Timeline graphs provide customization options over for zooming in on a specific period of time.

 

Maps

Map choropleths allow users to quickly visualize data across multiple geographic regions, with shades of color representing different brackets of values.

 

Letting the User Decide

As the website developer, you can request a component pack, which is a series of views controlled by selectors and pulldowns at the top.  Users can select from a variety of topics, views, geographies, data categories, metrics, time periods, and data sources.  The entire component pack can be implemented in a web page with a single, 10-line API call providing the greatest flexibility for the user and the least cost to the developer, as shown in the Quick Start Guide.

 

Customization

There are plenty of options for customizing the data shown, as well as customizing the theme and appearance of the table, chart, graph, or map.  There are options for customizing based on:

 

Data customization	Examples
Data Topic	Demographics, industries, education, etc.
View	Table, chart, graph, map
Regional geography	County, CBSA, city, census tract, block group, etc.
Time periods	Individual months or years, ranges of months or years
Data categories or breakouts	Age ranges, NAICS codes, degrees, income brackets, etc.
Metrics	Value, percent, average yearly change, margin of error, etc.
Map choropleths	Natural jenks breaks, quantiles, equal intervals

 

Tables, charts, graphs, and maps can also be customized to help match the website’s theme and dimensions.  The settings that can be configured per chart are:

Visual customization	Examples
Dimensions	Height and width
Layout	Orientation of table columns and rows
Colors	Chart and map colors