Resources

Visualization 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.
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 in JavaScript.
OpenFrameworks – an open-source C++ graphics library popular for video and media installations, similar approach to Processing.
Leaflet – a popular open-source mapping library
VTK – A scientific visualization library (C++ with wrappers for other languages)
Plotly – built on top of D3, offers abstractions that enable building interactive visualizations very quickly with well-known charts.
Bokeh – designed for high-performance interactivity over very large or streaming datasets in web browsers. By Anaconda team.
Seaborn – A Python-based visualization library with visually defensible defaults that builds on pandas and matplotlib.
Chroma.js – A color-math library for JavaScript capable of generating perceptually uniform color mappings.

Exploratory Visualization Tools

Tableau for Students – get a free Tableau license as a student
Tableau Public – a free version of Tableau which publishes to the web
GGplot2 – a graphics language for R
Voyager – web-based data exploration tools from UW’s Interactive Data Lab
GGobi – classic system for visualizations of multivariate data
Observable Plot – A concise JavaScript API for exploratory data visualization (from the authors of D3).

Tableau Resources

Tableau Training: Specifically the Getting Started video and Visual Analytics section. Most helpful when first getting off the ground.
Build-It-Yourself Exercises: Specifically, sections Build Charts and Analyze Data > Build Common / Advanced Chart Types, and Build Data Views From Scratch > Analyze Data are a good documentation resource.
Drawing With Numbers: blog with example walkthroughs in the Visualizations section, and Tableau Wiki has a bunch of useful links for the most common advanced exploratory / visualization Tableau techniques.

D3 Resources

D3 In Depth: Code notebook/textbook-like blog that aims to bridge intro textbooks and D3 official documentation.
D3: Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: O’Reilly book available online through CU libraries.
Bl.ocks: Bostock’s code-sharing platform that is the predecessor of Observable; it is the most thorough repository of D3 examples by virtue of having been around since the beginning, but note that most examples are built on D3@V4 or older.
Observable D3 Gallery: D3 templates and examples organized by type, mostly authored by Bostock, e.g. Methods of Comparison Compared
Observable Visualization Collection: D3@V5 showcase from Bostock as well as many others.
Observable Forums: includes tips specific to Observable platform, e.g. How to load css files

Historical Innovators

Contemporary Practitioners/Teams

Visualization Newsletters

Data Is Plural weekly round up of interesting projects on the internet by BuzzFeed Data Editor-in-Chief

Visualization Podcasts

Data Stories

Visualization Blogs and Publishers

Online Color Tools

0to255 – get lighter or darker shade of any color
ColorHexa – color conversion and detailed description
Adobe Color CC – pick with color wheel
Color Picker for Data – built off Gregor Aisch’s article
i want hue – color for data scientists, you can choose which algorithm to use
ColorBrewer – original choropleth color maker
ColourLovers – use color palettes designed by others
Canva Color palette generator – returns color palette of any photo you upload

Data Sources

NYC Open Data: data on NYC trees, taxis, subway, citibike, 311 calls, land lot use, etc.
data.gov: everything from hourly precipitation, fruit & vegetable prices, crime reports, to electricity usage.
Dataset Search by Google Research: indexes public open datasets.
Stanford Open Policing Dataset
Physician Medicare Data
Civil Rights Data Collection
Data Is Plural newsletter’s Structured Archive: spreadsheet of public datasets ranging from curious to wide-reaching, e.g. “How often do Wikipedia editors edit?”, “Four years of rejected vanity license plate requests”
Yelp Open Dataset
U.S. Census Bureau: use their Discovery Tool
US Health Data: central searchable repository of US health data (Center for Disease Control and National Center for Health Statistics), e.g. surveys on pregnancy, cause of death, health care access, obesity, etc.
International Monetary Fund
World Bank
IPUMS.org: Integrated Census & Survey Data from around the World
Federal Elections Commission: Campaign Finance & Expenditures
Stanford Mass Shootings in America Project: data up to 2016, with pointers to alternatives
USGS Earthquake Catalog
Federal Aviation Administration
FiveThirtyEight Data: Datasets and code behind fivethirtyeight.com
ProPublica Data Store: datasets collected by ProPublica or obtained via FOIA requests, e.g. Chicago parking ticket data
Machine Learning Repository - large variety of maintained data sets
Socrata Open Data
17 places to find datasets for data science projects
Awesome Public Datasets (github): topic-centric list of high-quality open datasets in public domains
Open Syllabus: 6,059,459 syllabi