Tutorials

Learn to visualize your data like an expert with these practical how-tos for presentation, analysis, and understanding.

How to map connections with great circles

There are various ways to visualize connections, but one of the most intuitive and straightforward ways is to actually connect entities or objects with lines. And when it comes to geographic connections, great circles are a nice way to do this.

How to Make Bubble Charts

Ever since Hans Rosling presented a motion chart to tell his story of the wealth and health of nations, there has been an affinity for proportional bubbles on an x-y axis. This tutorial is for the static version of the motion chart: the bubble chart.

How to visualize data with cartoonish faces ala Chernoff

The goal of Chernoff faces is to show a bunch of variables at once via facial features like lips, eyes, and nose size. Most of the time there are better solutions, but the faces can be interesting to work with.

How to: make a scatterplot with a smooth fitted line

Oftentimes, you'll want to fit a line to a bunch of data points. This tutorial will show you how to do that quickly and easily using open-source software, R.

An Easy Way to Make a Treemap

If your data is a hierarchy, a treemap is a good way to show all the values at once and keep the structure in the visual. This is a quick way to make a treemap in R.

How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution

A heatmap is a literal way of visualizing a table of numbers, where you substitute the numbers with colored cells. This is a quick way to make one in R.

How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare

You’ve seen the NameExplorer from the Baby Name Wizard by Martin Wattenberg. It’s…

How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools

There are about a million ways to make a choropleth map. The problem is that a lot of solutions require expensive software or have a high learning curve. It doesn't have to be that way.

How to Make a Graph in Adobe Illustrator

You can use the vector-based software normally reserved for designers and artists to make and edit charts.

How to Make Your Own Twitter Bot – Python Implementation

Following up on my post last week about using Twitter to track eating…

Grabbing Weather Underground Data with BeautifulSoup

Weather Underground is a useful site and a fun place for weather enthusiasts.…