You\u2019re welcome to use whichever tools you prefer for\u00a0your data visualizations, but these are the tools with which we have the most experience and recommend:<\/p>\n
You can get pretty far with Excel\u2019s built-in charts and graphs<\/strong>. They often don\u2019t look wonderful, but if they work, they work!<\/p>\n Google Fusion Tables<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0makes a great starting point, especially for simpler charts, like pie charts and bar charts. You can\u2019t do a ton of customization, but you can produce results with just a few clicks.\u00a0Here\u2019s a basic tutorial.<\/a><\/p>\n Tableau<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>has a lot of advanced features and documentation. If you want to install it on your own laptop, choose\u00a0Tableau Public<\/a>. This tool can be a little overwhelming at first, but UCLA\u2019s Lynda library has video tutorials; you might start with \u201cUp and Running with Tableau.\u201d<\/p>\n You can make some really cool graphs and charts with\u00a0RAW<\/a>,<\/strong> and it\u2019s easy to embed them on a website.<\/p>\n Quadrigram<\/a><\/strong> is a drag-and-drop, web-based tool for data visualization that’s pretty easy to use, and it’s pretty easy to embed the charts and graphs in your website.<\/p>\n DataWrapper<\/a> <\/strong>makes great-looking, simple, embeddable data visualizations. Definitely recommended if you’re not trying to do anything super-complicated.<\/p>\n I love\u00a0Palladio<\/a><\/strong>, but it\u2019s important to understand what it is and what it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s designed for the exploration (not necessarily the presentation) of humanities data. So while you can produce some impressive visualizations, you can\u2019t really embed them. (You can take screenshots, though!)<\/p>\n If you want to compare and contrast many images with each other, you can try\u00a0ImagePlot<\/a><\/strong>, but just be aware that it\u2019s not super-easy to use and we haven\u2019t tested it in awhile.<\/p>\n If you want to try your hand at some custom programming<\/strong>, we recommend the JavaScript libraries D3<\/a> and P5<\/a>. They’re not too hard to use! For learning D3, this is my favorite book<\/a>. For learning P5, this is the best resource<\/a>.<\/p>\n Want MOAR TOOLS?\u00a0Here\u2019s a huge list.<\/a><\/p>\n