Visual Communication: Visualization Tools

TimeLine, StoryMap, SoundCite, and Juxtapose

Edit images & video to upload to social media sites.

Online photo editing tool. Add graphics & text to your photos.

Create Flash-based videos in minutes. Share them online for free. (Watch this Wideo about the Elements of Design for ideas of what can be done.)

Merge a collection of images into a single unit. (Look for the app and instructions near the bottom of the page.)

GIF maker to create short, automated image-based animations and slideshows.

Generate “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Generate “word clouds” from text that you provide. More variety of shapes than Wordle. Requires Flash Player 11 to view.

Directory of free and for-fee data visualization tools broken down by function: Data handling, Charting, Programming, Multivariate, Mapping, Web-based, Color, and "Specialist".

Open-source, intuitive, drag-and-drop visualization tool with over a dozen visualization output types.

Data-driven tools for modeling historical data and analyzing relationships across a timeline.

For-fee tools (cloud- or server-hosted) that can help you see and understand your data. Connect multiple data sets, drag and drop to utilize visualization templates, and export to share.
A free/public version can be used with limited capabilities.

Upload your own data sets and create a wide variety of chart types: bar, bubble, candlestick, diff, scatter, and many more!

Free data visualization tools: icons, images, maps, charts, ready-to-use graphics. Get added features at an educational rate, too.

Cloud-based data visualization tools that "guide data exploration, automate predictive analytics, and enable dashboard and infographic creation."

Cytoscape is an open source software platform (which must be downloaded and installed) for visualizing and annotating networks and pathways. Originally designed for biological research, but works well for complex network analysis and visualization.

Software Studies Initiative, a digital humanities research group, has developed several free programs and apps for image analytics and data visualization.

Web-based, mobile-friendly, and JavaScript-created charts and graphs. Free trial never expires!

JavaScript code library for web-based data visualization tools. These are not plug-n-play, so will require a know-how than the other tools listed above.

Semi-automated tool to to reverse engineer images of data visualizations to extract the underlying numerical data.

A diagnostic tool for evaluating the robustness of individual color schemes in data maps.

Once you open a Design Project, select "Elements" in the left-side menu, then "Charts". You can select a base chart type, add your own data, and manipulate the size, number, color, icons, labels, etc. of the final chart export.

Free, reusable (under Creative Commons license) silhouette images of biological organisms