Tools for Data Visualization | Hacker News Reader

Tools for Data Visualization

datavisualization.ch

198 pointsDanBC20 comments

I'm surprised R is on there but ggplot2 isn't. R is great for working with data, ggplot2 is great for actually visualizing that data. I believe Wickham is considering redesigning ggplot2 to use D3 to enable interactive visualizations.

I think the point is that R can do both statistical analysis and graphing. You don't need ggplot2 to produce good plots in R, however, I do agree that ggplot2 is a very good graphics package.

Regarding ggplot2 and D3, it's already possible to draw ggplot graphics in the browser, consider looking at the following two repositories:

https://github.com/hadley/r2d3 https://github.com/gigamonkey/gg

You'd probably want to speak to Hadley for more information on his goals, regarding ggplot2 & D3. I'd certainly like to try out any combination of these tools.

can you please show me a repository of R graphs that look half as polished/nice as graphs made in d3? I am not challenging or being confrontational I am actually curious why you think ggplot2 produces great vizes. I am new to data visualization, but I've worked in bit in R before and understand it's power to handle large data sets. Do you mean that they are great as in they are very functional for producing basic static charts like in Tableau? Or dynamic/creative vizes too?

In my line of work, clients are more concerned about "out-vizzing" the competition by creating mind-blowing "Wow!" vizes. Doesn't this rule ggplot2 out for the most part?

ggplot & R aren't really for "out-vizzing" anyone.

While d3 is a great tool for analysis as well, it's more for presentation than exploration, I think.

R and ggplot2 are for exploration & analysis, with the added benefit that ggplot2 makes wonderful plots fit for publication. They're quite beautiful, and well done, but not creating interactive, shiny visualizations.

They all have their place in the ecosystem.

This is a nice resource.

I scraped the basic info and put it up on Google Docs for anyone who wants the raw data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmdQMmlwPBAndHF...

(Note: I took the liberty of adding Wolfram|Alpha Pro, which I work on)

Why not adding a comment to make that clear?

Fair point -- done.

This is awesome. Would love to have some extra metadata about each project in one place, though. For example, version, GitHub info, etc.

D3 still seems to be the best of the bunch: most mature and most flexible. Right now we're using a combination of R for heavy data processing and refinement, and D3 for visualization. They make a good pair.

I've been experimenting with the R/D3 setup as well and so far I really like it. Another thing that's great is that for any sort of traditional data visualization R has you covered, leaving D3 for what it's best at: custom and/or interactive visualization.

Interestingly enough almost all my coding has been in the browser since I've been using Tributary [http://tributary.io/] for D3 prototyping and RStudio Server for R (which is amazing if you haven't tried it)

Although I haven't used it yet, it's worth mentioning Shiny from the RStudio team http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/ which makes it pretty painless (so I hear) to create interactive R visualizations.

I have two problems with d3.js right now. 1) I have a hard requirement for IE 8. 2) All d3.js sites look the same.

2 I could get over, I suppose, but I really need something slick, simple & fast that works in IE.

The bonus with D3 is that (2) is up to you. Seeing as it's constructing SVG, you just need to design a plot such that it looks unique. I have a feeling that the reason why D3 sites look similar is due to copy & paste coding (which is adequate for most people).

I've you're looking to build something custom from primitives and you need ie support I would definitely recommend Raphael.js [http://raphaeljs.com/] They claim ie6+ support and in my own experience this has been true. Granted I was just making little dynamic pie charts, but they looked fantastic in IE6 (I'm actually surprised it isn't in more common usage by designers to certain visual bugs in IE6).

Raphael.js is really just a nice way to handle svg, and so it lacks some of the niceties of d3 as far directly tying your visualization to the data. But it's still a great tool.

That's my current top contender for the switch. I figure we'll start with g.raphael.js and then if we outgrow it we can just upgrade to the full library.

After just having spent a couple days wrestling with g.raphael.js, I would recommend against it. The documentation is vague and incomplete, the generated graphs are inconsistent (e.g., points placed outside of axes), simple bugs with fixes in pull requests have been sitting for months with no response...honestly it looks abandoned.

While I don't have 2nd problem, I'm also considering alternatives to d3.js because of the 1st one.

I've seen that some people tried combination of d3.js and Raphael in order to overcome this issue (for instance: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9559365/raphael-and-d3-js...), but I haven't tried it myself yet. I would be very interested to hear any experiences regarding this particular combination (d3, raphael).

A "sort by license" option would be nice on this page (ala the existing code/no-code switch):

http://selection.datavisualization.ch

And by language.

I'm currently working on a project of turning a TON of data into something less of an eye sore than a ppt slide...you good sir have given me one hell of a jolt of inspiration with this post.

Thank you!!!

Is there a browser based solution equivalent to MS Excel pivot charts? I know of chartio.com, but they seem to be pretty expensive. Office 360 maybe?

graphviz should be in this list.

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