a curated guide to the best tools, resources and technologies for data visualization
databits.io is an invitation-based website where creative coders, engineers, data journalists, and data scientists multiply impact by sharing work and connecting.
Create and share charts for CSV, Excel and JSON files. Connect and visualize data from apps you are using. It takes no effort. One single place, the natural way, all for free.
A community of data visualization developers dedicated to helping you do a better job processing, analyzing, sharing, and presenting your data.
A suite of modular libraries and tools which work together or independently to enable rich interactive content on open web technologies via HTML5.
Build and share spreadsheet-powered apps, visualizations, tables and more all from Google Sheets.
Inline audio players. Easy to make. Seamless to publish.
Typeform is a nimble, fast & surprisingly sexy way to ask questions to your users, customers & peers, on any device.
A Python script that allows Excel or Google Sheets to be used as a CMS to populate site templates.
Sheetsee.js is a client-side library for connecting Google Spreadsheets to a website and visualizing the information in tables, maps and charts.
Grano is an open source tool for journalists and researchers who want to track networks of political or economic interest. It helps understand the most relevant relationships in your investigations, and to merge data from different sources.
A tool for turning structured text into web pages or interactive visualisations. Archie Markup Language, or ArchieML, is designed to be easy for non-developers to use.
A guided-tool that allows anyone to easily and speedily submit FOIA requests for data from governments without going through the often lengthy and cumbersome process many government agencies require.
DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, and will add advanced interaction controls to any HTML table.
A simple but useful web app that allows you to create a dashboard from multiple URLs in iFrames.
A Chrome-specific bookmarklet that extracts SVG nodes and accompanying styles from an HTML document and downloads them as an SVG file—A file which you could open and edit in Adobe Illustrator, for instance. Because SVGs are resolution independent, it’s great for when you want to use web technologies to create documents that are meant to be printed (like, maybe on newsprint).
Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents. Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn.
Ractive.js is a template-driven UI library, but unlike other tools that generate inert HTML, it transforms your templates into blueprints for apps that are interactive by default. Two-way binding, animations, SVG support and more are provided out-of-the-box – but you can add whatever functionality you need by downloading and creating plugins.
Reporter is a new application for understanding the things you care about. With a few randomly timed surveys each day, Reporter can illuminate aspects of your life that might be otherwise unmeasurable.
A Silk site lets you answer questions with your data by creating overviews and visualisations. It lets you create visualizations, maps and overviews. It works its magic by using the connected information from your fact sheets. Silk sites that contain pages with numbers on prices, size or distances can create interactive charts that put all of your data in perspective.
Phototrails is a research project that uses media visualization techniques for exploring visual patterns, dynamics and structures in user-generated photos. n Examples/reference: Instagram Cities
PANDA is a tool for journalists to manage data within the newsroom. First and foremost PANDA is a “data library”, which means that it stores all the data you work with-voter registration records, police reports, water testing results, etc. organization.
Describing itself as “a social network for data people,” Data.World acts as a real-time stream for sharing datasets–with searchability, exploratory data analysis, SQL query support and visualization tools all on-the-fly.
A group of plugins for responsive tables.
Kendo UI offers a comprehensive HTML5/JavaScript framework for modern web and mobile app development, offering everything professional developers need to build HTML5 sites and mobile apps.
Useful resource to consider if you have manual data tasks that need accomplishing and you’ve a bit of spare budget to outsource it.
ImagePlot is a free software tool that visualizes collections of images and video of any size.
DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, which will add advanced interaction controls to any HTML table. n See also: Examples
Whether you would like to tally an afternoon or a year, Daytum can help you collect and communicate the most important statistics in your life.
The “most effective platform on the web to engage your audience through rich media embeds.”
Embedly provides you with actionable analytics, thoughtful related content, and proven results.
Circos is a software package for visualizing data and information. It visualizes data in a circular layout — this makes Circos ideal for exploring relationships between objects or positions. There are other reasons why a circular layout is advantageous, not the least being the fact that it is attractive. Circos is ideal for creating publication-quality infographics and illustrations with a high data-to-ink ratio, richly layered data and pleasant symmetries. You have fine control each element in the figure to tailor its focus points and detail to your audience. n Examples/reference: Images
A set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations in Java.
A set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations in ActionScript.
A handy repository for uploading original PDF documents for institutional storage, highlighting, annotation and visualization on the web.
A visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs.
A vector graphics scripting framework in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.
A simple but powerful library for building data applications in pure JavaScript and HTML.