Visualisation Tools

There are hundreds of visualisation tools and packages used by researchers at University of Oxford and beyond. The IDN cannot hope to be a reference or a recommendation engine for all of these solutions. For a birds eye view of what tools are available you might find this resource useful: http://www.visualisingdata.com/resources/.

In general, visualisation tools fall into one of two categories:

• Point and Click Tools: These allow users to build visualisations interactively, for instance selecting columns from a spreadsheet-like view of your data and clicking “Create BarChart”. Examples of this type of tool include: Excel, SPSS and Tableau.
• Scripting Tools: These require users to write code (or scripts) to generate visualisations, such tools in general have a steeper initial learning curve than “point and click tools” but allow greater overall flexibility and extensibility. Examples of this type of tool include: Python, R.

IDN Supported Tools

The IDN offers advice, support and consultancy in building interactive data visualisations that meet the following conditions:

• Visualisations are hosted online.
• Visualisation may be embedded in personal, research group or publisher websites (via <iframe></iframe>)
• The data behind the visualisations is made available for download and subject to an appropriate data license.

Additionally, the IDN provides Shiny app hosting for University of Oxford researchers - which you may read about on the IDN Shiny Apps page.