F&M College Library

Data Science

Numeric Data

Generate polished, static charts. Using the tool is straightforward!

Tableau works with numeric and categorical data to produce advanced graphics. Browse the Tableau public gallery to see examples of visuals and dashboards.

Raw Text

Certain corpora have built-in visualization tools, such as Google Books ngram viewer, HathiTrust Bookworm, or JSTOR for Research.

General Purpose

Coding Options

  • R 
    R is not only a standard statistical analysis tool, but also a powerful visualization platform. The ggplot2 package is the primary graphic-making package. There are also numerous packages meant to extend the functionality of ggplot2. From animations to maps to other advanced graphic options (check out shiny to make interactive plots!), these extension packages help make publication-worthy graphs. For those working with text data, the tidytext and tm packages are good options for cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing text data.
     
  • Python 
    Like R, Python has libraries to make impressive visualizations. While matplotlib is the main graphics library, there are additional Python libraries focused on visualization, including making interactive plots/charts, 3D images, maps, and more. (Read here for a more in-depth discussion of how the Python visualization libraries fit together.) When working with text data, the nltk and TextBlob libraries are useful for analysis and visualization.

Looking for inspiration?

One of my favorite websites, Information is Beautiful, takes data and information and turns them into infographics and beautiful data-visuals.