Advice & inspiration

Data visualization tools for free or cheap

After finally taking the time to watch the NewsU webinar on data visualization that I blogged about back in March, I was inclined to research more about different apps, tools and concepts required to create compelling data visualization interactives. Interestingly enough, I have found that regardless of owning the Adobe suite, anyone can put together stunning graphics with open-source applications.

My graphics professor, Alberto Cairo, taught us with the best: Illustrator, Flash and Maya. However, there are cheaper substitutes for each of these options: Freehand ($399) in place of Illustrator ($599), Blender (FREE: open-source) instead of Maya ($1,995), and a creative use of HTML instead of Flash (or a free 30-day trial version!).

Now, what about even cheaper options? Wordle is a great, free tool for text visualization. A practical example that was given in the NewsU seminar was Wired’s “The Democratic and Republican National Convention Speeches, as Seen Through Wordle.”

Other data visualization suggestions that IBM’s Martin Wattenberg highlighted during the webinar include iCharts, processing, flare, and swivel, among others.

Personally, I believe one of the best tools out there for data visualization is Many Eyes, an open-source social network by IBM (and developed by NewsU’s two speakers, Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas).

The New York Times launched “Visualization Lab” back in October, which is a version of Many Eyes specifically for Times readers. When it first launched it didn’t allow users to upload visualizations of their own data sets, but now after looking over it briefly it appears that they have pre-determined sets of data for the user.

FlowingData wrote a great post around the launch of Visualization Lab listing “40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data.” Journerdism soon followed this post with a great complement list of “25+ bodacious and inspirational visualizations for data, interactivity and new storytelling forms.” I highly recommend that you spend some time with both of these posts to find a visualization tool that fits your specific needs.

Lastly, back in January I blogged about five tools for constructing interactive charts for free or cheap. One worth noting again is Open Flash Chart, an open-source tool that allows the creation of Flash charts without ever using Flash.

Thanks to @fcoel for today’s topic!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Intro to Information Visualization: 50+ blogs, books, people, software & more
• MSNBC interactive editor Vu Nguyen discusses stimulus tracker
• “Datavisualization.ch Inside” provides postmortems of information visualization projects

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