Data Visualisation Hub

Welcome to the Hub!

Promoting and building community around data visualisation at the University of Sheffield

Visualisation has always been at the core of extracting understanding from data, but powerful, modern, open source, interactive and web-based visualisation tools have revolutionised the potential for research data impact.

dataviz.shef

To help our researchers make the most of their data and take advantage of such tools, we (Research Software Engineering, the University Library and CICS) have been working on dataviz.shef, a multi-pronged initiative to provide tools, training and build a community around interactive data visualisation at TUoS.

ORDA data visualisation showcase

In 2017, ORDA (Online Research Data) was launched, a free platform for all University of Sheffield research staff and students to share their datasets, code, presentations, posters, grey literature and other non-traditional research outputs. As part of ORDA, we've developed a data visualisation showcase site where researchers are able to host interactive data visualisations and also link them to reposited data in ORDA.

Community

We’ll be hosting a variety of events including talks & symposia, workshops, vis-coding clubs and data visualisation hackathons!.

OxShef dataviz

We’re collaborating with the Interactive Data Network at the University of Oxford as OxShef dataviz and will be co-organising events and co-developing open CC-By resources. More details to follow soon. Look out for a blogpost on this but for now, you can follow the initiative on twitter

We’re also working on developing a community communication framework. We’ve started with a TUoS google group which can be joined here through a TUoS google account. But we are working on expanding and diversifying communication channels and have now added a slack channel for more informal communication and chat. Join here.

Resources

There many tools for visualisation. We've narrowed it down to some of the most popular technologies that interact well with research workflows, are flexible, and allow introducing interactivity. The majority of our documentation will live on the OxShef Charts site and includes details on chart types and tutorials on producing them in R and python. These will continue to be added to.

Contribute

From ideas to content for the ORDA showcase, our blog or datavis documentation, contributions are open to all. For the moment just get in touch with us through the google group or slack team.