Visualising data – a catalogue of resources
visualisation-wordle-graphic
There’s a continuing stream of tools and resources for visualising all kinds of data. After coming across quite a few sources myself and from other sources (including Journadism’s excellent list, the extensive article – Data Visualisation: Modern Approaches from Smashing Magazine and a recent presentation by Max Gadney of the BBC for the Information Design Association) I thought it would be useful for anyone who reads this post (and myself) to make another list. Please feel free to add to it:
Online tools
Doodlebuzz – create typographic maps of news stories
Wordle – popular tool for generating word clouds
Wordcount – tracking the use of words and language across the web
IBM’s Many Eyes – data visualisation tools
New York Times Visualisation Labs – tools for visualisation of New York Times data (powered by IBM’s Many Eyes)
retrievr – search Flickr by sketching
Xtimeline – Explore and create timelines
RSS Voyage: Visualise your RSS feeds (beautiful & graceful)
Quintura: visual search engine by way of clouds and explanations
Twitter visualisation with screensaver: Twistori
Pachube – monitor and share real-time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet
Visual Thesaurus: Interactive dictionary and thesaurus (costs but free trial available)
Swivel: making data useful. Upload, share, explore
TreeViz – fast interactive visualization of large data structures organized in a tree
Dabble DB – create and manage online databases
FeedVis – an interactive tag cloud tool for RSS feeds
Gapminder - tools for viewing a fact-based world
Revealicious - graphic visualisations of your Delicious account
Offline tools
Touchgraph – work with Excel data or visualise Google search results
The R Project for Statistical Computing – statistical computing and graphics
Prefuse – download the software toolkit to create complex data visualisations
Processing – open source programming language to produce images, animation and interaction
Inspiration: People
Information Architect’s Web Trend’s map – seminal ‘map of web movers and shakers’ updating every year
Shan Carter’s work at the New York Times
Feltron – creator of the Feltron Annual Reports and for Penguin, We Tell Stories: Hard Times
Chris Jordan – His photography project over the last few year’s Running the Numbers
Ben Fry – author of Visualising Data for O’Reilly and creator of an excellent portfolio (associated with Processing above)
Karl Hartig: Data Visualisation – charts, diagrams, information graphics
Mandelbrot on Twitpic – finance-related visualisations
Well Formed Data (Elastic Lists) – Moritz Stefaner’s work
Munterbund – graphical visualisations of text
Concept Maps from Dubberly Design Office. Including visualisation maps of the creative process, a model of play and a model of innovation.
Inspiration: Websites
Silobreaker – news aggregator
Maptube - a free resource for viewing, sharing, mixing and mashing maps online
Daylife Labs – news aggregator
GPS Drawing – Drawing with Global Position System technology
Digg Labs - various ways of visualising high level of activity on Digg
World Mapper – a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest
Getty Images’ Moodstream – images still and moving tuned to your mood (based on what you select)
Newsmap – visualisation of world news by country (similar in layout to Oursignal)
Oursignal – visualisation of data from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Hackernews, Yahoo Buzz
Stamen Design’s Travel Time Maps for MySociety
Financial Times Global Micromaps Track global market indices and global currencies on an interactive world map.
Threat Meter on Newsweek (powered by Daylife) is an intelligent content services platform, is a brilliant interactive tool that allows you to assess and rate the ‘heat’ of a list of issues.
Breathing Earth – real-time simulation of CO2 emissions, birth & death rates by country
Twitter Venn – the relationship between words on Twitter
Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard
Helsinki live bus monitor – check where the bus is, what time it’s going to arrive (hopefully coming to a city near you soon)
Online news and resources
Flowing Data – data visualisation and statistics
Visual Complexity - “intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks”.
Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods
References
Smashing Magazine Diagrams: Tools and Tutorials – a list of tools for drawing diagrams, charts and chart-flows
(thanks to Cameron Chapman) Web traffic visualisation - Click Density, Click Tale, Click Heat, Crazy Egg
Read Sarah Perez’s article from ReadWriteWeb last year for a great list of ways to visualise your social network data including Amazon, Last.fm, Flickr, music, search engines, web traffic: The Best Tools for Visualisation
Here’s a couple of examples:
Last.forward – An open source software for analyzing and visualizing social networks (good with Last.fm).
Fidg’t Visualise: Play around with data from your network whether that be Flickr or Last.fm tags.
Excellent article from Semantic Foundry – Dynamic Visualisation: Introduction & Theory
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