The following are examples of data-related projects that highlight. Note more complex projects, especially ones with custom platforms, are grant or institutionally funded, which enables scholars to create more robust public-facing works.
Divisions of the Bible - a data visualization project that uses the tool Tableau
Mapping Shakespeare’s Tragedies - a network visualization project that uses the tool Gephi.
Navigating the Green Book - a mapping project that uses the tools Mapbox, Leaflet, and Open Street Map
Also see, Humanities & Data for more projects
Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration - a visualization project shows the historical immigration to the U.S. (1830 -2015)
World Health Chart - A visualization project that displays fertility rate, life expectancy, and population of countries in six world regions using Gapminder
The Opportunity Project - brings technologists, government, and communities to rapidly prototype digital products—powered by federal open data—that solve real-world problems for communities across the country.
Facebook Data for Good - utilizing Facebook data, and featuring on providing insights on the topics including social connections, relative wealth, COVID-19 impact, climate change, etc.
Human Genome Project - an international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings
LIGO - a scientific collaboration of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves
The New England Seismic Network - a BC science project that shows how much the ground moves in Weston, Massachusetts
WorldWide Telescope - a science project for showcasing astronomical data and knowledge
The following questions are helpful to consider when beginning a data project.
Are you looking for data & statistics with a time period or geography focus?
Are you looking for a specific data type? e.g., qualitative, qualitative, GIS, multimedia
Are you collecting your own data for your research?
Have you started searching for data sources?
Do you need support on data management (DMP), preservation, or sharing?
What data format are you using? e.g., Excel, Stata, SPSS
What data tasks do you need to conduct?
Data cleaning: the process of preparing data for analysis by removing or modifying data that is incorrect, incomplete, irrelevant, duplicated, or improperly formatted.
Data merging: the process of combining two or more data sets into a single data set.
Aggregation (Summarization): the process of gathering data and presenting it in a summarized format.
What format does your data come in? e.g., Excel, text file, JSON, PDF, spatial
Do you have any preferred visualization tool you want to use?
Do you need help with choosing the visualization tools?
Digital scholarship data projects usually involve data visualization and/or the creation of databases for the purposes of making data more manageable, navigable, and intelligible. Depending on the tools and methods used, different types of visualizations can be achieved and queries run for asking and answering scholarly questions. (See examples.)
Among other takes, data projects require planning, the acquisition of existing data or collecting of new data, data cleaning, and structuring, and, of course, analysis. (Also see, Research Data Lifecycle.)
BC Libraries' Data Services facilitates, supports, and consults on data acquisition, management, curation, and visualization as well as design and provide data-related in-class instruction and workshops. BC's Research Services also provides support as well as licenses for platforms like ArcGIS.
There are a variety of data visualization tools available, many of them open source, to help you explore existing data visualization or to create your own. Below are a few examples.
Excel is a powerful tool for getting meaning out of vast amounts of data and offers a library of chart and graph types to help users visualize their spreadsheet data.
Tableau is a data visualization and analytics platform that enables users to connect to a variety of data sources and explore the data in a simplified way. The drag and drop interface makes it very easy to visualize and create interactive dashboards without any programming skills. (Browse the Tableau public gallery to see examples of visuals and dashboards.)
Palladio is a web-based data visualization tool for analyzing relationships across time and visualize historical or cultural networks.
Gephi is free software for visualizing networks. The main website hosts official tutorials and also links to popular community-developed tutorials.
D3.js is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It is ideal for people who want to develop some JavaScript Programming skills and offers great power and flexibility.