For quick questions you can email me
To schedule a 45 minute consultation at Dana library or online: Schedule appointment
Consulting services are available to help you visualize and present your data and information. This will be most helpful toward the end of your project when your data is complete or mostly complete.
What to bring to a consultation:
-Your dataset and ideas
-The key points you want to communicate
-Who the audience is
-Any requirements for the project
What we'll talk about:
-The best charts, graphs, figures, or infographics to show your data or information. These can be added to papers, posters, presentations, and other projects.
-You will create the visuals. I can help with choosing and supporting software based on what you are comfortable with and what would be best for the project.
Here are a few popular data visualization tools and information about how to access and use them. There are hundreds to choose from online. These were picked because they are free or available through UVM and I have some familiarity with them.
Data visualization
Excel
Excel is familiar to many people. It is a spreadsheet program you can create graphs and charts with. To make graphs unique you can customize and refine them. Here are available chart types and how to select data to make a chart.
Data wrapper
Data wrapper is easy to use and suggests graph types when you add data. The graphics look great and the free version allows some basic customization.
Tableau
Tableau lets you import and combine data sources. It is used mostly for business data. You can build visualizations with a drag and drop interface. Students and Instructors can use the full version of Tableau for free for a year with renewals. Tableau Public allows you to create graphs for free if user/data privacy is not a concern. It is a more limited version.
You can get started with Tableau starter kits, preparing your data for Tableau, and pivoting data from columns to rows.
R
R is a statistical analysis tool that can also be used to make complex and customizable data visualizations. You can download R and RSTudio. The primary graphic making package is ggplot2 from the Tidyverse.
Learning R:
R-Ladies Sydney - This is for complete beginners to R. It is a set of videos that get you set up to work in RStudio and then go through an analysis step by step with an example dataset.
Swirl - A package that teaches R programming interactively and at your own pace in the R console.
Practice making charts with reproducible code in the R graph gallery and Plotly.
R for Data Science (2e) is a popular book to learn how to transform and visualize data.
Posters, presentations, and infographics
The poster guide from the Dana library website has great design tips and poster templates.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint is presentation software created by Microsoft. It includes shape tools that can be used to develop infographics and diagrams when applied creatively.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard for creating illustrations and is often used for graphic design, including infographics. It has a learning curve but is very versatile once you know how to use it. You can use it at the Howe Library computer lab or pay by subscription.
Canva
Canva is an easy to use and free web-based program. You can create posters and infographics. There are templates to choose from and some customization.
Network graphs
Gephi
Gephi is a network visualization tool. It uses "nodes" and "edges" to show items and their connections. Here are tutorials on how to use it.
VOSviewer
VOSviewer is used for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. VOSviewer Getting started has a video and instructions. There is also a VOSviewer manual with more detailed instructions.
Research Rabbit
ResearchRabbit is a citation-based literature mapping tool.
