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Digital Scholarship / Digital Humanities
Data visualization & analysis
- Representation of data:
- Is the purpose to accurately and clearly share date in a non-biased way?
- Or is it trying to attract viewers and promote a certain perspective?
- All representations are by their very nature not reality - how close can you get to the truth?
- What questions could you answer with your data? What trends or relationships do you see?
- Quantitative vs. qualitative analysis - do you just want to know what, or do you want to know why?
- Data analysis is a desirable skill relevant to many fields and disciplines.
- Students can either create visualizations themselves or analyze existing examples.
Check out this historically and culturally significant example of data visualization available at the Evelyn S. Field Library!
W.E.B. Du Bois's data portraits: visualizing Black America : the color line at the turn of the twentieth century by Call Number: E185.86 .D846 2018Publication Date: 2018At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the famed sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois presented a series of groundbreaking data visualizations advocating for African American progress. These graphs, charts, and maps provided powerful glimpses into the lives of black Americans to convey both a literal and figurative representation of what Du Bois famously referred to as "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these infographics - beautiful in design and impactful in content - made visible a wide spectrum of black experience.
Tableau Public
Free platform to display visualizations; download open source software to work with data: https://public.tableau.com/s/
- The only way to save the visualization is to upload to the public site, so don't use any private or sensitive data!
- Unique terminology makes this tool challenging to use, but the website offers many examples that can be analyzed rather that creating them yourself.
- Variety of visualization options and styles, including charts, graphs, maps, and much more!
- How-to videos available here: https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/resources
Tableau Public introductory video
This brief video introduces you to the platform and demonstrates how to upload and work with data to create a visualation, or "viz."
Additional options
These other free web-based platforms may be more accessible to your students
- PiktochartCreate visualizations and infographics, as well as posters, presentations and more. Free account gets 5 visuals.
- VismeCreate charts, graphs, infographics, videos, and more. Free account gets 5 visuals.
- CanvaCreate charts, graphs, infographics, and more. Free account gets two folders to organize designs, 1GB storage.