#USE DATATHIEF WITH NO AXIS SERIES#

It will warn you if too many or too few pixels are detected. This function will then return the x and y coordinates of each data point. Then one pixel for each data point you wish to extract (default color: pure green).

Do the same for the y-axis (default color: pure red). To use this tool, first annotate the plot by adding a single pixel at the start and end of the x-axis in a specified color that does not exist anywhere else in the image (default color: pure blue). If you want to extract a lot of data, or extract data from a continuous line, you are better off using the original Java DataThief package, or one of the many online tools that do exactly this. However, it might be annoying for a large amount of data. This makes it more transparent how the data are being read and makes the results more reproducible. Unlike the Java DataThief package and similar online tools, here the user manually annotates the figure with the data points of their choosing. The more high priority the hard drive, the harder it is to bypass security measures Notice: Requires one of the following virtual reality headsets: HTC Vive or Valve Index.

#USE DATATHIEF WITH NO AXIS SERIES#

Inspired by the Java package of the same name. Data Thief is a 3D VR puzzle game set in a technology-themed world where the player must solve a series of laser grid puzzles in order to steal priceless data. He is leading efforts to put rigorous science front and center in our sustainable agriculture work, and finding ways to improve sustainability through corporate practices and public policy.Small utility for retrieving data from figures. Jon Fisher is a senior conservation scientist for the Center for Sustainability Science at The Nature Conservancy. Photo Credit: Flickr users Phil and Pam under a Creative Commons license. Opinions expressed on Cool Green Science and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy. Note that despite the name, DataThief is shareware if you find it useful, please put your thieving on hold long enough to buy a $25 license. Second, it is possible that the data you are extracting is copyrighted, and that your reuse of their data may violate the data license. First, these values will only be approximate, so if possible it’s always better to get the underlying data from the person who created the first figure. There are two important considerations before using this software. Note that the unemployment percentage never surpasses the percentage of people who are uninsured (contrary to how this appeared in the original graph):

This allowed me to calculate the percentage of Americans who are uninsured, to allow us to compare that to the percentage of Americans who are unemployed.Ī graph of the resulting data reveals a different pattern than what we saw before: lack of insurance is increasing very slightly (from ~15.2 percent to ~16.1 percent) as unemployment increases more rapidly (from ~4.4 percent to 7.6 percent). I then got some estimates of US population for January 20, and used those to calculate an average growth per month, the baseline population in March 2007, and the population for each of our data points. In Excel I multiplied the values for “Uninsured Americans” by a million to get the true number. I used DataThief to extract the underlying data (see my blog Science Jon for detailed instructions on how I did this), which looks something like this: This graph - by having an absolute value on one y-axis, and a percentage on the other y-axis - creates the false impression that unemployment and lack of insurance are both sharply increasing (and that the rate of unemployment has surpassed the rate of lacking insurance). (I’m using a figure unrelated to conservation for demonstration purposes). To show how useful this can be, I’m starting with a misleading graph I recently found and recreating it to be more informative and honest. Or maybe you wanted to extract the data so that you could do your own analysis (or at least produce a clearer graph)? You’re in luck!ĭataThief is a program that lets you take an image of a graph or chart and extract the underlying values. Have you ever looked at a difficult-to-read graph and wished there was a way to figure out what the precise values of the data were?

Use datathief with no axis