Visualization Resources

by Alper Sarikaya on March 15, 2017

We’re going to curate a list of (potentially) useful resources for data visualization here.  If you have any suggestions, let us know!

Other Data Visualization Courses

A selection of other data vis courses.  Note that nearly all of the offered classes are also in Computer Science, and therefore may be more implementation/programming-specific instead of design-focused.

Data Visualization Toolkits

These are all useful tools to know and have in your toolbox.  Knowing what sort of visualizations these are useful for can help narrow down the toolkits relevant for your particular task or project.  You might be interested in a high-level overview comparing these tools—Lisa Charlotte Rost has two blog posts that help provide this context: one for visualization tools, one for visualization libraries.

  • D3.js — A web-based framework for displaying data using SVG in the browser; can be extended to displaying spatial (e.g. cartographical) information as well.  A little bit of a learning curve, but widely used in interactive data journalism.
  • Processing and Processing.js — A design-oriented programming language; makes it very easy to create an interactive data visualization.  The javascript version allows for web-based vis.
  • Google Maps API — The original mashup tool, useful for placing data in their geographical contexts.
  • Mapbox’s Leaflet.js and Mapbox Studio — Very flexible tools for displaying data on an interactive map, definitely useful to learn if interested in cartography (and even better with WebGL-enabled vector maps using Mapbox GL JS!).
  • PolyMaps — Quickly get up and running with SVG-based maps
  • WebGL (and OpenGL) — Support for three-dimensional visualizations and large data visualization using the GPU.  High learning curve, but very powerful.
  • VTK — Scientific data visualization toolkit (C++), especially useful for tensor and volumetric methods, mesh operations, and three-dimensional interaction.
  • The InfoVis Toolkit (IVTK) — Java-based toolkit for quickly creating abstract data visualizations.

Data Analysis/Gathering Toolkits

These are tools to help you gather data (e.g. scrapers) and the analysis and transformation of data.

Gathering

  • Import.io — A tool to help gather data from arbitrary websites.  Clunky, but once you get it working, can even gather up-to-date data.
  • Web scraping — Some ideas for harvesting data.
  • Tableau Public — Connect to spreadsheets and extract data for tabular and geographical viewing.
  • Microsoft Excel — Useful interface for gathering data from manual input and quickly visualizing trends using threshold rules or sparklines.

Analysis and Transformation

  • Tableau for Students — The full version of Tableau provides facilities for defining abstractions, hierarchies in data, and suggests types of visualizations for particular visual tasks.
  • UpSet — A recently-released academic tool to allow analysts to find relationships in their data.
  • Matlab and R (and GGplot2) — Statistical analysis tools for transforming data.  Both are very powerful and thereby have a little learning curve.
  • NumPy/SciPy — Python-built numerical analysis and transformation libraries.
  • SQLite3 or your favorite type of database — Useful for on-demand visualizations to query data or generate metrics.

Color Resources

Some ideas for building color-ramps and selecting color palettes:

  • Adobe Color CC — Originally called Kuler, provides a way for creating ‘harmonious’ colors based on various metrics; also can browse other user-selected palettes.
  • Cynthia Brewer’s Colorbrewer2 — Perceptually-aware color mappings, great for mapping continuous and categorical data to binned colors. Check out colorbrewer.js for easier inclusion in web-based visualizations.
  • Conor Gramazio’s Colorgorical — Randomly generate distinct colors for labeling categories by category; can add color constraints (like use this color, don’t use this range of color)
  • Color by HailPixel — A fun way to build a color palette by moving the mouse around.

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