Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 395

This specialization is a current theme in visualization development. It's easier
and more efficient to build tools to handle specific data types than try to
develop software that handles everything imaginable.

Gephi is the go-to open source software to visualize networks and systems.
It's “like Photoshop for graphs.” Whenever you see a static graph with a lot of
nodes and edges, it was most likely created with this software. On the desktop,
you can easily explore and interact by clicking and dragging, and you can
export images when you find something interesting.

Treemap, developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University
of Maryland, enables you to explore hierarchical data via said treemaps.
Originally created by Ben Shneiderman in 1990 to visualize the contents in a
hard drive, the software, shown in Figure 2-11, is now more flexible, interactive,
and free to use for noncommercial use.

For static, statistical graphics, my personal favorite is R in combination with
Adobe Illustrator. R is the statistical computing language of choice, which has
recently gained steam in the data community, and Illustrator is a program that
a lot of designers use.

Note: See Chapter 7, “Where to Go from
Here,” for more on tools and programming for
visualization.

As you venture out to visualization for the web, the pro-
gramming skill requirements seem to increase, but there
are a lot of packages to help ease you into the area. It's
not drag-and-drop simple, but developers have learned
that providing a lot of examples get people to use their
software, which is great for everyone.

A few years ago, online visualization was almost all in Flash, but that has
since faded. It's all about JavaScript and HTML5 these days. Again, there are
a lot of libraries, but Data-Driven Documents (D3) by Mike Bostock, Raphaël
by Dmitry Baranovskiy, and the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit by Nicolas Garcia
Belmonte are your best bets for starting. You can of course always upload
static images online, but loading visualization native in the browser brings the
added benefit of graphics that can update based on current data. Programming
in JavaScript also allows you to incorporate interaction and animation, which
can add another dimension to data exploration and presentation.