Software

Introducing yourself to R as an Excel user can be tricky, especially when you don’t have much programming experience. It requires that you switch from one mental model of the…

Remember the artist Tatsuo Horiuchi who uses Microsoft Excel to paint scenery? Four years later, he’s still at it. Watch below. Horiuchi is my favorite example of someone who shows…

This looks like a fun Processing tutorial by Etienne Jacob. Use noise to draw organic-ish loopy GIFs. I bet the logic could be ported to R.…

Russell Goldenberg released Scrollama.js in an effort to make scrollytelling more straightforward to implement. Scrollytelling can be complicated to implement and difficult to make performant. The goal of this library…

David C. Brock writing for IEEE Spectrum delves into the origins of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all…

Picking colors is one my favorite things to do with visualization when I’m not in a rush for time. But when I can spare the minutes to pick and choose,…

Elijah Meeks released Semiotic into the wild. It’s a framework that allows quick charts but provides flexibility for custom stuff. Semiotic is a React-based data visualization framework. You can see…

The new R package miner is an interface to Minecraft via some simple R commands. The miner package provides just a few simple functions to manipulate the game world: find…

Ian Johnson provides some good direction for those looking to get their feet wet with d3.js.…

When you first get a CSV file, sometimes it’s useful to poke at it a bit to see what’s there. Sometimes you need to restructure the data or sort it…

deck.gl is an open source framework developed by Uber to visualize large datasets (mainly geospatial ones, naturally). It started as an internal tool but was released to the public in…

Plug in any dataset into a magic box and it spits out a lovely visualization you can show all of your co-workers, friends, and family. That’s the promise of a…

There are two main reasons annotation is often a challenge. The first is that writing copy that is succinct with the right amount of detail is tricky. The second is…

Facebook released Prophet, which is a procedure to quickly forecast with time series data. Prophet is a procedure for forecasting time series data. It is based on an additive model…

Some say annotation is the most important layer for charts meant for public consumption. It directs readers where to look and what’s important. But the process is not always straightforward.…

For Excel users getting started with R, pain oftentimes finds its way into the learning process. Gordon Shotwell feels your pain and provides a primer to shifting to a different…

There are a lot of R packages, which is why before I implement any chart type myself, I look to see if someone already did it. Recently, the official R…

There are a lot of visualization-related tools out there. Here’s a simple categorized collection of what’s available, with a focus on the free and open source stuff. This site features…

Embedding.js is a work-in-progress JavaScript library by Beau Cronin that makes it more straightforward to create data-driven environments. Think virtual reality and rotating areas in the browser. From Cronin: [I]t’s…

The tweenr package in R, by Thomas Lin Pedersen, helps you interpolate data for easier animated transitions. tweenr is a small package that makes it easy to interpolate your data…

D3.js, or Data-Driven Documents, version 4.0 was released a few months ago, so Jim Vallandingham updated his tutorial for categorized bubble charts to use the new version of the library.…

Default color schemes are often horrible, but spending a lot of time putting together color schemes when you don’t have a lot of minutes is also horrible. I Want Hue…

In case you didn’t get the memo, pattern fills are back and so hot right now. In the category of new-to-me, Textures.js by Riccardo Scalco is a JavaScript library that…

Map making is a finicky challenge where oftentimes your map data — points, lines, and polygons — must align just right with your external data that exists as a CSV…

One of best ways to learn visualization in any given software is to look at examples and apply to your own data. The R graph gallery helps you with the…

Interactive charts in R are still so-so, but if you don’t mind giving up some flexibility and just want something quick without having to learn a new language, there are…

Last month Pitch Interactive launched an online tool for tiled cartograms, or tilegrams for short. Upload your state-by-state data, and it does the rest. Now you can make them in…

A challenge of using geographic maps to show data is that larger regions inevitably get more visual real estate. Cartograms try to solve this problem by sizing regions by the…

CSV files are great, but every now and then you have to edit them for errors or format them for the next step. You could use Excel. I’ve been using…

D3 is the most commonly used JavaScript library for visualization on the web, but there’s a bit of learning curve, especially for those new to programming. Peter Cook hopes to…