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Digital Humanities at Georgia Southern

Data Visualization

This list is contains tools to data visualization software and several real world examples

 

Tools:

RawGraphs: Easy to use, drop in data and visualize it in lots of ways.

Gephi: Gephi is one of the three standard data visualization tools for mapping networks.  The tutorial using data about characters from Les Miserables is here.  And a tutorial for making Gephi spreadsheets is here.

Palladio: Visualize complex historical data with ease.

NodeXL: NodeXL is specifically designed for working with Excel files to visualize networks, and it also has built in connections for working with some social media platforms.

Cytoscape: Similar to Gephi but designed specifically with biology in mind.  This means it has certain features that Gephi does not, and it is in general a more developed platform.

Processing: Open source drawing and development environment, interesting for teaching as it was originally developed as a tool for teaching programing to visual artists.

Social Network Visualizer (SocNetV): Social network analysis tool.

yEd: Useful for diagrams and flow charts.

Digital Methods Tools: Lots of different tools for small-scale, quickie data viz here.  From the European Digital Methods Initiative (DMI).

Prezi: Although often used in a linear fashion in a manner similar to the hypercard format of Powerpoint, Prezi is a presentation software designed around moving along edges between nodes.

UCINET: An older network analysis tool that is still updated and has an important user community and data sets.

Pajek:Another older network analysis tool from the late 1990's, which brought important ideas into the field.

Google Ngram Viewer: When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books.

Google Trends: Lets you see and compare data of what people have been searching on the web.

 

Examples:

New York Times' Data Visualization: A website full of modern examples of how this data can be visualized.

Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity: Lots of examples here, based on Lima's Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (2013) and Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (2011).

Albert-László Barabási's Network Science (2015).  A textbook companion with explanations, examples and tools.

Graphics - The New York Times: Data visualization, maps and other visual journalism from The New York Times Graphics Desk

Music Map: An interactive tree graph of the relationships between music genres.

Kindred Britain: Stanford project showing kinship connections between people in British history.

Game of Thrones on Twitter: An example of community detection using Twitter posts and Wikipedia recaps for Game of Thrones.  The explanation of the data viz is here.

Black Shoals Project: A 'planetarium' that turns companies, their stock prices and relationships into a starry sky visualization.

Edward Tufte: The doyen of data visualization's website.  He is famous for his trilogy of books including "Envisioning Information."

"Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art" by Alain Badiou: Begins with a discussion of Mark Lombardi's work on visualizing covert networks and a high quality image of a network he drew multiple times between 1979 and 1999.

Hans Haacke: 1971 artwork "Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971" showing Manhattan real estate in relation to developers as a system.

Ed Ruscha, "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966): An example of archival art, attempting to capture the street at a moment in time.

Charles and Ray Eames, "Powers of Ten" (1977): A short film using cascading images to show the relative size of the universe.