Research Guides: Case Competitions: Data Visualizations &amp; Presentations

Introduction

Data Visualizations & Presentations

Once you've conducted your research and analysis, the next step is to create a professional and polished presentation that clearly organizes your information and stands out to your audience or judges. There are many resources available at Purdue, as well as external guidance and templates to help improve the visual quality of your presentations.

Presentation & Data Visualization Tools

Presentation Guidance

Purdue Presentation Center
The Lamb School’s Purdue Presentation Center is available to help students with any aspects of preparing for or delivering a presentation. Their experienced tutors can help with any stage of the presentation process.
Public Speaking and Presentations: Tips for Success
This resource includes tips and suggestions for improving your public speaking skills.
Designing an Effective PowerPoint Presentation
This presentation is designed to quickly introduce you into the world of PowerPoint creation. It covers concepts of visual rhetoric, design, and good presentation skills.

Presentations Tools

Purdue Video Express
Self-Service video production studio, with multiple locations across campus.
Piktochart
Create infographics, posters, presentations, and more. Free options available.
Canva
Provides templates and graphics for posters, flyers, presentations, and more.
Google Slides
Develop presentations with free templates available through Google.
Prezi
Create dynamic presentations that move and zoom.
SlidesCarnival
Free PPT templates and Google Slides themes for your presentations
Microsoft Office 365 at Purdue
Purdue has licensed Office 365 from Microsoft to make it available for free on an individual basis to students, faculty and staff, including use on their personally owned machines.

Image Editing

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring (from website).

Resources Available at Purdue

Data Visualization Experience Lab of Purdue
The D-VELoP lab computers hold many tools for developing graphics, conducting data analysis, GIS, and more. Assistance also available upon request.
Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC)
The Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is part of ITaP and serves as the central hub equipping Purdue’s information producers with data, tools, services, and expertise.
ITaP Available Software for Students
Includes MATLAB, NVivo, SAS and other programs that can be used for data analysis
Tableau at Purdue
A PC based tool that translates data into optimized visual images to see patterns, identify trends, and quickly discover visual insights. Requires license product key provided with purchase. Licensing requests can be submitted to bicc@purdue.edu
The Data Mine
Students will work with a number of data visualization tools as they learn to choose the right visual representation of data based on the type of data.
VACCINE
The Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, creates methods, tools, and applications to analyze and manage vast amounts of information for all mission areas of homeland security in the most efficient manner. (from website)

Free Data Visualization Tools Online

Open Data Tools: Visualization
A list of open tools available for data visualization.
Open Data Tools: Analysis
Recommendations for tools on scraping web pages and other data needs
Google Charts
Google chart tools are powerful, simple to use, and free. Try out their rich gallery of interactive charts and data tools (from website).
RAWGraphs
RAW Graphs is an open source data visualization framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone (from website).
Datawrapper
Datawrapper lets you show your data as beautiful charts, maps or tables with a few clicks. Free version available
The R Project
R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.
Plot.ly
Provides open-source data visualization tools. Free options available.
Knight Lab
Northwestern University Knight Lab is a community of designers, developers, students, and educators that creates innovative suite of open-source, adaptable, and lightweight tools for media makers.

Featured e-Books

Foundations of Data Visualization by Chen, Min. editor.; Hauser, Helwig. editor.; Rheingans, Penny. editor.; Scheuermann, Gerik. editor.
Publication Date: 2020
This is the first book that focuses entirely on the fundamental questions in visualization. Unlike other existing books in the field, it contains discussions that go far beyond individual visual representations and individual visualization algorithms.
Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke
Publication Date: 2019
This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures.

Freely Usable with Attribution

Creative Commons Search
Browse over 500 million images, available for reuse. All content is under Creative Commons licenses or in the public domain.
Flickr Creative Commons
Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.
Wikimedia Commons
Historical and contemporary images, including high-resolution images of maps, diagrams, people, and more.
The Noun Project
The Noun Project community of designers from 120+ countries is building the most diverse and extensive collection of iconography ever created. These icons can be used for free with attribution

Royalty Free Stock Images

Unsplash
Over 2 million free high-resolution images brought to you by a community of photographers.
Prexels
All photos and videos on Pexels are free to use and do not require attribution.
Pixabay
Copyright free images, videos and music. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes (from website).
Shotstash
ShotStash offers all of our high-quality free stock photographs under a generous CC0 license with absolutely no restrictions. Attribution is not required, but readily accepted and encouraged.
Nappy
Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free. For commercial and personal use.(from website)

Guidance

Accessibility Tools

Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA)
Downloadable tool that tests color contrast errors on websites and non-websites, like PowerPoints, graphics in Photoshop, instructional materials, and more. In the CCA, you can select the a foreground color and background color using the eyedropper tool.
Microsoft Accessibility Checker
Before sending your email message or sharing your document or spreadsheet, run the Accessibility Checker to make sure your Microsoft Office content is easy for people of all abilities to read and edit.