
Data Visualization Catalog - reedwolf
https://datavizcatalogue.com/index.html
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nikhizzle
So some brief advice from spending about 5 years as a visualization
engineer/designer/data scientist:

1\. Get an intuitive understanding of the data

2\. (via Alberto Cairo) Aim to allow the user to correlate, organize and
compare this data

3\. Come up with a few visual means to do no. 2, and get feedback and iterate.

4\. Go to the catalogs and see what work has already been done on your version
of 3, and then implement.

It is amazing how many "original" charts I have created which have already
been named and studied from a perceptual science point of view. But it is
still important to come to a clear understanding from your own point of view
of how the data fits that representation.

~~~
mistrial9
>> "original" charts I have created which have already been named and studied

thank you! I am slightly embarrassed to say, I thought I had personally
invented a certain version of the BoxPlot, and after vacation presented it our
Department Head, whose wife has a Masters Degree in Statistics! I told a story
about what I wanted to solve, and how I intended to solve it, and the BoxPlot
part was buried in there.. so it wasnt that bad. Only I (and now you, the
reader) noticed my internal error.

~~~
stevenbedrick
Just to chime in as somebody who's taught data viz for years: I didn't hear
anything in your story for you to be embarrassed about! Accidentally re-
inventing the box plot just means that you're thinking at the same level as
Mary Eleanor Spear and John Tukey, and in my book that's something to feel
pretty good about. :-)

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stevesycombacct
See also: Chartmaker Directory-
[http://chartmaker.visualisingdata.com/](http://chartmaker.visualisingdata.com/)

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xavdeboisredon
I had so much trouble building a catalog for my data visualisation.

As data scientists and software engineers, Tristan Mayer, Daniel Velasquez,
and I have spent hours trying to find the most relevant datasets to do our
analysis. Once we found the right one, we couldn't understand how to use it,
or if we could trust it. This is painful but unfortunately too common.

We interviewed 150 companies at the end of our studies to search for
solutions. Every one of them faced the problem. We worked hard for 6 months to
build a solution and released the first version of our product.

Go check it out www.castordoc.com and give us feedback!

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atlasair
The design bureau ferdio has made a much prettier version:
[https://datavizproject.com/](https://datavizproject.com/)

~~~
mrlatinos
But it doesn't link to any implementations as far as I can tell. It just asks
you to hire Ferdio.

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zylepe
I’ve referred to this resource in a couple of talks I’ve given on data vis. My
advice is always to learn about different kinds of standard charts that are
out there, then when visualizing a dataset use the best combination of words,
numbers, and pictures to convey your idea. This may Or may not fit into a
standard chart type.

Edward Tufte’s books have a lot of great examples for static visualizations
and Bret Victor has some great examples applying these concepts to software
([http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/))

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dtjohnnyb
I've just moved to a data scientist job where most of the work is done through
Scala. I've loved working with Scala for all the type safety and compiler
helpers, but the lack of a data visualisation library makes me feel like I've
lost a limb whenever I'm doing exploratory data analysis. I wonder why one
hasn't been developed when it seems like there's twenty different libraries
for python!

~~~
nikhizzle
I use Vegas and am very happy with it for all but the most complex
visualizations.

[https://github.com/vegas-viz/Vegas](https://github.com/vegas-viz/Vegas)

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xtiansimon
I'm researching graphs used to communicate I/O error. I'm using histograms and
scatterplots.

I suspect there was no small amount of work to develop the top-down,
ontological framework for this catalog.

I wish there was a search feature for use cases to access the catalog from the
bottom up. I would like the chance to discover additional visualizations using
terms specific to my use case.

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vharuck
These are all great to use for data exploration. But if you're going to show
data to a non-analyst audience, stick to bar charts (not histograms), trend
lines, pie charts, and choropleth maps.

I'm not trying to condescend. I've tried for years to introduce more chart
types, bit always received pushback on how hard they were to read.

~~~
rrrrrrrrrrrryan
I worked for a company that made data visualization software a couple years
back (basically a Tableau type thing, but specific to one industry).

Even though our end-users were analysts, we still had "trainers" who we paid
to show up in-person, on-site, to teach the end-users how to read all the
types of visualizations that our software could generate. The visualizations
weren't tremendously complex, but when most real-world analysts still spend
most of their time in Excel, a brief explanation is still required for the
end-users to actually buy-in.

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archarios
Is D3 stil the best JS library for visualization? I used to make D3 components
full time and it was pretty great. [https://d3js.org/](https://d3js.org/)

~~~
zylepe
I used to use d3 for all parts of data visualizations, but lately I find
myself using d3 utilities just to manipulate data to prepare for
visualization, but then using a front end framework like react to render to
the dom. This feels a lot cleaner than using d3 for dom manipulation.

~~~
archarios
well yeah of course d3 is not a general purpose dom manipulation tool.

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nazca
No love for the corporate stalwart waterfall chart. I'm not sure why, but it
is often ignored or despised by people who geek out on data viz.

~~~
kitrose
In my experience, this is the go-to chart for understanding financial drivers
at the senior leader/board level.

Even the popular plotting libraries in python don’t seem to have an easily
configurable version. Recently tried plotly and found it plotting the
categories in reverse order from the intuitive way you’d expect to see.

I’ve been meaning to script my own custom plot since Excel’s waterfalls are
tedious to create and you don’t get enough control over the labeling.

~~~
nicolaskruchten
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Plotly... I'd be curious to hear more
if you're willing to share! Were you working in Python or Javascript or within
our GUI?

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JeanMarcS
That's the first time I see a chord diagram. I understand the concept, but I
think it's very hard to apprehend

~~~
Tarq0n
Plotting directed acyclic graphs while displaying the edge weights and node
sizes is a bit of an unsolved problem. I agree that in most cases chord
diagrams are more confusing than illuminating, but so are the alternatives.

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alexzender
See also
[http://visualizationuniverse.com/charts/](http://visualizationuniverse.com/charts/)
made by Adioma - with search interest and data from Google Trends.

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kgersen
paid components only ?

for instance, treemap:
[https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/treemap.html](https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/treemap.html)

I don't see echarts treemaps.

