LibGuides: Data Visualization: Visualization Tools

Before Visualization

To ensure a smooth visualization process, data-sets must be clean. "Data cleaning" refers to the process of standardizing the data-set. Entries must be spelled correctly, labeled and formatted the same throughout the entire data-set in order to avoid processing errors. Data cleaning can be tedious and time-consuming to do by hand. Sites such as DataWrangler or Open Refine (formerly Google Refine) make the task easier by helping with the data cleaning process.

Software-Based Tools

Cytoscape
Cytoscape is an open source software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and biological pathways and integrating these networks with annotations, gene expression profiles and other state data. Although Cytoscape was originally designed for biological research, now it is a general platform for complex network analysis and visualization. Cytoscape core distribution provides a basic set of features for data integration, analysis and visualization. Additional features are available as apps (formerly called plugins). Apps are available for network and molecular profiling analyses, new layouts, additional file format support, scripting and connection with databases. Most of the apps are freely available from Cytoscape App Store.
D3 (Data Driven Documents)
D3.js is a free JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. Users will find that some background in coding is useful when working with this tool.
DataHero
DataHero is a company with the aim to make big data visualization as easy and understandable as possible. Users have the option to upload their dataset from any cloud service and let the DataHero tool do the rest or for the more advanced user, the option to create their own graphs and visualizations. Suggested charts and drag-and-drop chart creation make it easy to uncover insights within data and communicate them with dashboards.
Gephi
Gephi is a tool for data analysts and scientists keen to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop™ but for graph data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden patterns.
Science of Science (Sci2)
The Science of Science (Sci2) Tool is a free modular toolset designed by developers at Indiana University. It supports the temporal, geospatial, topical, and network analysis and visualization of scholarly datasets at the micro (individual), meso (local), and macro (global) levels.
Tableau Public
Tableau is an advanced data visualization tool that does not require any programming or coding skills. This free of cost, somewhat limited version of Tableau is devised to create visualizations that go directly on the web.
Weave
Weave is a web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of users – novice to advanced – as well as the ability to integrate, analyze and visualize data at “nested” levels of geography, and to disseminate the results in a web page.

Online Tools

Google Chart API
Google Chart API allows users to easily create charts from data and then embed the charts in a web page.
Quadrigram
Focusing on story-telling, Quadrigram allows you to combine texts, images and interactive visualizations to bring your data to life. No coding skills necessary.