NICAR 2012 Free Data Visualization Tools: Resources

by Sharon Machlis, Online Managing Editor, Computerworld
Email: smachlis@computerworld.com
Twitter: @sharon000

Chart of 22 free data visualization and analysis tools: http://bit.ly/DataVizToolChart
Accompanying Computerworld story: http://bit.ly/DataVizToolStory

Google Refine: http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/
Screencast of how to reconcile a file in Google Refine with the U.K. OpenCorporates Web service (similar steps will work for other sources such as Freebase):http://vimeo.com/17924204

Timeflow: https://github.com/FlowingMedia/TimeFlow/wiki/

ESRI Mapping for Everyone: http://www.esri.com/mapping-for-everyone

QGIS: http://qgis.org
Timothy Barmann's great QGIS tutorials:
Intro: http://tbarmann.webfactional.com/nicar/qgis_tutorial/
Dynamic maps: http://tbarmann.webfactional.com/nicar/js_mapping/tutorial/

Google Fusion Tables: http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/
Rebecca Shapley's Get More Out of Fusion Tables resource sheet: http://goo.gl/Wkm0f
Chrys Wu's How to make a heat map in Fusion Tables: http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/126628/how-to-make-a-heatmap-in-google-fusion-tables

IBM's Many Eyes http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes

Tableau Public: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public
Tips for formatting Excel data for use in Tableau, plus a link to an Excel plug-in: http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/preparing-excel-files-analysis
Links to Tableau Public training materials: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/ire

Weave: http://www.oicweave.org
MetroBoston DataCommon Weave-based examples from planner Susan Brunton: http://metrobostondatacommon.org/profiles/sbrunton/
Housing and transportation cost visualization: http://metrobostondatacommon.org/visualizations/172/
My story about Weave on Computerworld: http://j.mp/WeaveStory

R Project for Statistical Computing: http://www.r-project.org
R for Statistics: First Steps (PDF) by Peter Aldhous http://www.peteraldhous.com/CAR/Aldhous_CAR2011_RforStats.pdf
Hands-on R, a step-by-step tutorial (PDF) by Jacob Fenton http://jacobfenton.s3.amazonaws.com/R-handson.pdf
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics by Nathan Yau http://book.flowingdata.com (more info, not the actual book)

Google Charts wizard for JPG images: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image/docs/chart_wizard.html. Note: A month after the NICAR 2012 conference, Google announced that they will be phasing out this tool over the next few years.
Google Visualization API: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery.html. The Visualization API is still supported and was not affected by the phase-out announcement.
Michelle Minkoff's step-by-step tutorial on the Google Visualization API at Poynter: http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/126595/how-to-make-simple-web-based-google-charts/

JavaScript libraries:
InfoVis toolkit: http://thejit.org
Protovis: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis

Exhibit (MIT SIMILE spinoff) http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit

Highcharts: http://www.highcharts.com
Examples:
  Basic line: http://www.highcharts.com/demo/line-basic
  Zoomable time: http://www.highcharts.com/demo/line-time-series

Mr. Data Converter - free tool by Shan Carter at the New York Times to turn Excel, csv or tab-delimited data into Web-friendly formats such as json or XML:
Web tool: http://shancarter.com/data_converter
Source code: https://github.com/shancarter/Mr-Data-Converter