About DotPlot

Developed by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Dotplot is a visualization tool that allows you to tell a story about data. Our primary use case is mapping a diverse community of people in a playful and interactive way. All too often, the only way to get a sense of event attendees or members of a distributed network is to search for and review a significant amount of resumes and background information. This approach takes excessive time and effort, and turns what should be exciting and fun — meeting new people and finding potential collaborators — into a chore, something to be avoided or put off. This is where Dotplot intervenes, bringing a sense of joy back into the process and helping to facilitate even more discoveries of commonalities and uniqueness among group members.

Don’t be scared to use Dotplot — it should be pretty easy! To generate a dynamic visualization, all you need is data collected in a spreadsheet (in the form of a CSV file), possibly gathered through survey questions. Dotplot then visualizes the data for you.

Each question is visualized in a "frame".

Each dot represents one individual (see more use cases below).

By clicking on a dot, you can see all other responses given by that individual.

Dotplot might also be useful for:

• Showcasing the variety of initiatives your organization is working on — highlighting information about starting dates, thematic foci, people working on the project, type of work, etc.
• Comparing different educational initiatives to better understand common themes, and areas of discrepancy

An initial version of the tool was supported by Google Summer of Code. Dotplot is an open source project — its code can be found on Github.