Practice data sets
Open data sets are an excellent resource for learning new data visualization methods. Below are platforms and collections of data that you may wish to visualize using your software/packages of choice.
Specific datasets to consider:
- New York City Restaurant Inspection Results: "The dataset contains every sustained or not yet adjudicated violation citation from every full or special program inspection conducted up to three years prior to the most recent inspection for restaurants and college cafeterias in an active status on the RECORD DATE (date of the data pull)." Download results as a *.csv table.
- FiveThirtyEight College Majors data: "This folder contains the data and code behind the story The Economic Guide To Picking A College Major.All data is from American Community Survey 2010-2012 Public Use Microdata Series." Download recent grad student data as a *.csv table.
Collections of datasets:
- FiveThirtyEight Data: data used in FiveThirtyEight data journalism articles, shared via GitHub
- data.world open data sets: 429 open data sets, primarily from small governments.
- jboutros's Open Data Portals (via data.world): "List of over 2700 open data portals from around the world"
- NYC Open Data Portal: Thousands of datasets related to New York City.
- toddmotto's Public APIs list: a very large collection of public APIs, which you can use to fetch information. Categories range from Music, Animals, Finance, Sports, Cryptocurrency, Science and Math, etc.
Data Visualization Blogs and Web Roundups
Here are several places you can find collections of very effective data visualization, including Best-of lists.
- Flowing Data: "FlowingData explores how statisticians, designers, data scientists, and others use analysis, visualization, and exploration to understand data and ourselves."
- Information is Beautiful: "Distilling the world's data, information & knowledge into beautiful infographics & visualizations."
- Tableau Public Gallery: Viz of the Day: "Stunning data visualization examples from across the web created with Tableau Public." A collection of Tableau Workbooks (often showing dashboards composed of everal worksheets). Many workbooks can be downloaded by clicking the far right icon on the Tableau bar beneath the visualization.