Data & Tools

IBM’s Many Eyes is another good tool for quickly testing out different visualizations of a data set. While it will prompt you to log in, you can freely use the interface by clicking Cancel on that prompt.

Another data visualization tool, Gephi offers a downloadable application focused on complex graphs of network data.

D3 (Data-Driven Documents) is a powerful JavaScript library that makes it easy to load and visualize data sets within a web page. It’s particularly handy to use to generate graphics from data retrieved through APIs, and there’s a large community of open source contributors around it making handy variations and templates you can use.

This web app lets you drag or paste in data and quickly play around with several different visualization formats. Check it out at raw.densitydesign.org.

Kimono is a user-friendly version of what’s typically called a web scraper. This software tool generates an API (application programming interface) from a website of your choosing, allowing you to quickly construct data sets from different types of resources.

dataportals.org hosts a huge collection of (collections of) data, organized by place. This is a great source for municipal data sets: for example, zooming down onto Boston will lead you to the Metro Boston DataCommon, where you can explore visualizations relating to culture and the arts, among many other categories, and export the raw data from those visualizations or from new ones you create.

The New York Public Library has a lot of excellent digitized collections, among them a huge set of maps of New York and other areas. In addition to browsing and search interfaces, they provide an awesome tool called Map Warper which lets you overlay historical maps onto a dynamic present-day map. You can check out some hightlights here, and view the collection itself at maps.nypl.org.