Data & Visualization Resources
Table of contents
Popular Visualization Tools
Visualization Programming Toolkits
A variety of useful toolkits have been designed to help support information visualization applications. Some include support for the full visualization pipeline from data to interactive graphics, while others focus only on a subset, typically graphics and interaction.
- D3 – A JavaScript library for data-driven DOM manipulation, interaction and animation. Includes utilities for visualization techniques and SVG generation.
- Vega – A declarative language for representing visualizations. Vega will parse a visualization specification to produce a JavaScript-based visualization, using either HTML Canvas or SVG rendering. Vega is particularly useful for creating programs that produce visualizations as output.
- Vega-Lite – A high-level visualization grammar that compiles concise specifications to full Vega specifications. We’ve put together an interactive workbook to introduce you to Vega-Lite concepts. Further Vega-Lite readings are available through the University of Washington’s data visualization curriculum.
- Processing or p5.js – A popular Java-like graphics and interaction language and IDE. Processing has a strong user community with many examples. p5.js is a sister project for JavaScript.
- Leaflet – A popular open-source mapping library
- VTK – A scientific visualization library (C++ with wrappers for other languages)
Visualization Authoring Interfaces
- Tableau for Students — get a free Tableau license as a student
- Tableau Public — a free version of Tableau which publishes to the web
- Observable — an interactive notebook that can be a useful environment for prototyping D3 visualizations
- DataWrapper — easy to use online software to create visualizations from prepared data; used by many news sites and online publications.
- RAWGraphs — rich customization of a variety of chart types
- Flourish — a popular tool among data journalists to author data stories
- Voyager and Polestar – web-based data exploration tools from UW’s Interactive Data Lab
- Lyra – an interactive visualization design environment
- Charticulator — create bespoke chart designs without programming
- Data Illustrator — create infographics and data visualizations without programming
Color Tools
- kuler – Color Palette Generator
- Color Brewer
Network Analysis Tools
- Gephi – an interactive graph analysis application
- NodeXL – a graph analysis plug-in for Excel
- GUESS – a combined visual/scripting interface for graph analysis
- Pajek – another popular network analysis tool
- NetworkX – graph analysis library for Python
- SNAP – graph analysis library for C++
Datasets
- Data is Plural, a spreadsheet archive of useful/curious public interest datasets curated by Jeremy Singer-Vine (with an accompanying newsletter).
- dataCommons.org
- Civic Data Sets for the Pacific Northwest
- An archive of datasets distributed with the R statistical language
- 30 Places to Find Open Data on the Web – Visual.ly
- Office for National Statistics (UK) – a repository of detailed statistics about Great Britain and Northern Irland
- World Bank Data Catalog
- CDC NCHS Data – CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Data Access
- Machine Learning Repository – large variety of maintained data sets
Further reading and resources
Podcasts
Visualization Blogs
- Multiple Views
- Flowing Data
- Chartable
- eagereyes
- Lisa Charlotte Rost
- Alberto Cairo
- Visualizing Data
- Nightingale
- Gregor Aisch
- Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
- Visual Business Intelligence by Stephen Few