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Data Visualization: Practice and Get Inspirations

Open Data for Practices

Open data sets are ideal resources to tap into create data visualizations. Below are the data sets you may wish to access to learn and practice the data visualization methods using different tools.

  • FiveThirtyEight -a journalism site that makes its datasets from its stories available to the public. These provide researched data suitable for visualization and include sets such as airline safety, election predictions, and U.S. weather history. The sets are easily searchable, and the site continually updates.
  • BuzzFeed -makes data available to the public through its GitHub page. Users can find data analysis, libraries, and guides, all open source. Some example data sets include FCC comments and data breaches, fake news sites, and figure skating scores, among other varied things. 

  • The U.S. Census Bureau -offers a wide variety of datasets on everything from population to foreign trade. These sets are free, and researchers can access them through a simple data search. The site includes maps, tables, statistics, and data profiles. 

  • Earth Data -offers science-related datasets for researchers in open access formats. Information comes from NASA data repositories, and users can explore everything from climate data to specific regions like oceans, to environmental challenges like wildfires. *

  • EU Open Data Portal - Provide high value datasets to create sample visualisations.
  • Open Data Hub - Datasets mostly fall in either Mobility and Tourism domains. Some data are available on request only.
  • Tableau Free Public Data Sets

(* Source from 12 Excellent Datasets for Data Visualization in 2022)

Get Inspirations

Check out the resources below to look for more data visualization inspiration.

"FlowingData explores how statisticians, designers, data scientists, and others use analysis, visualization, and exploration to understand data and ourselves." It is a blog — a combination of highlighting others’ work, author's projects, and visualization guides — is a free resource for everyone. 

A recognized data visualization professional showcase, "Information is Beautiful" is dedicated to making sense of the world with graphics & data-visuals. 

The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. They choose topics where visuals inform and entertain.

A curated list of awesome open-source data visualizations frameworks, libraries and software. 

A curated list of data visualizations research papers, books, blog posts, and other readings.