Data visualisation and communication
The JGI runs:
- Bristol DataViz Group: a group for individuals interested in data visualisation, where members can skill-share, discuss data visualisation topics and highlight great examples.
- Beauty of Data Competition: a competition to find the best data visualisations from University of Bristol research.
Communication
For creating reproducible code-driven documents, we recommend:
- Quarto (formerly RMarkdown) for Python, R or even without code (for example, this website!)
- JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebooks for Python.
Dashboards
For rapidly building dashboards in Python or R, we recommend:
Web visualisations
For more complex data visualisations targetted at web pages, try the javascript library D3.
No-code tools
There are many tools that can be used for visualisation (and analysis) of data tat do not require code. Although these can be difficult to version control and may require additional software licenses, they can be much more accessible for collaborators. These might be a good fit for some projects.
Excel: useful for quickly exploring data. Very flexible and generally accessible to all. But can introduce problems with some data types and easy to follow bad practices.
Power BI: primary used for business analysis. Can connect to a variety of data sources inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Can produce dashboards that can be shared securely within the University.
Tableau: similar to Power BI. Popular in industry. We often have a training session on Tableau during Data Week.