When I meet with people and talk about our work, I get asked a lot what technology we use to create interactive and dynamic data visualizations. To help you get started, we have put together a selection of the tools we use the most and that we enjoy working with. Read more
We recently attended an interdisciplinary visualization workshop that was all about creating a dialogue between scientists, technologists and designers. It was interesting to discuss the different ways in which these groups think about visualization and how they use it for different purposes. Very bluntly put, each group lacks something another group knows and cares deeply [...] Read more
I just left the Stamen studio where I had a brief chat with founder and CEO Eric Rodenbeck. He enthusiastically showed me their newest work: maps.stamen.com. Read more
Visualizing.org launched their brand new Visualizing Player, a terrific tool for embedding interactive and static data visualizations. Read more
Protovis is an open-source visualization library by the Stanford Visualization Group and has become one of the preferred tools in our arsenal. If you want to get started with the popular toolkit too, Jerome Cukier has a comprehensive tutorial about how to work with data in Protovis. Read more
The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows the power of visualization: instead of offering a huge but abstract data set, Google created a simple visualization tool that shows the data and makes it easily queryable. Read more
Polymaps is a free, open-source JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps. It is the result of a collaboration between Stamen Design and SimpleGeo. Read more
Together with Kim Rees from Periscopic I have reviewed the social data visualization application Swivel. Swivel is a simple to use web application that lets you visualize public or private data sets and collaborate openly or in closed user groups. Read more
Humble software development released a new visualization library called HumbleFinance. It is inspired by the Domestic Trends visualization of Google Finance, but uses pure JavaScript instead of Flash to display the data. Read more
On its trail to organize the world’s information, Google has just added a new experimental product to their Lab. The Public Data Explorer makes “large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”. It is designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. Read more
Tableau Software today launched a new product that brings public data to life on the web. Tableau Public lets anyone who posts content to the web easily create interactive visualizations and publish them online. How it works Tableau Public is a freely available desktop application and can be downloaded from the Tableau.com website. The data [...] Read more
The Google Earth blog recently posted some examples of how well Google Earth can be used as a scientific visualization platform. The examples are posted by Thijs Damsma from the OpenEarth Initiative. Read more
To successfully visualize your ideas you need adequate tools. Pencil and paper for basic ideas. Pixel or Vector graphics for more precision. Scripting languages for interactive visualizations. Serverside data processing for dynamic or real-time visualizations. To give you an overview over the best tools available we introduce libraries, applications, web services and so on.
