Data Toolbox

Initially based on a list by Prof. Bahareh Heravi, with some additions from me. You can find a list of even more tools on SPJ Toolbox.

Collection

• Web Scraper — browser plugin for scraping
• Outwit Hub — desktop app for scraping
• Parsehub — desktop app for scraping
• Visualping — monitor website changes
• Tabula — get data from PDFs
• WebPlotDigitize — digitise image charts
• Map Digitizer — digitise image maps
• IFTTT — automate tasks
• NodeXL — network analysis
• Media Cloud — media analysis
• R / rvest — programming language
• Python / beautifulsoup — programming language
• Selenium — browser automation
• curl converter — convert curl commands to Python, JS, R, etc.
• SelectorGadget — CSS selector helper
• data.page — JSON to CSV converter
• SVG crowbar — lift SVG off of webpages

FOIA

• FOIA Wiki — FOIA resources (US-focused)
• Data Liberation Project — released government datasets
• WhatDoTheyKnow — FOIA tool and catalogue

Wrangling

• Microsoft Excel — desktop spreadsheets app
• Google Sheets — free spreadsheets web app
• OpenRefine — data cleaning and transformation (R implementation)
• Parserator — parse addresses and other unstructured text
• Geocodio — geocode 🇺🇸🇨🇦 addresses

Analysis

• Microsoft Excel — desktop spreadsheets app
• Google Sheets — free spreadsheets web app
• R / rvest — programming language
• Python / beautifulsoup — programming language
• SPSS — statistical analysis software
• PSPP — statistical analysis software
• Tableau (paid) — data analysis and visualisation tool
• QGIS — desktop mapping software
• CARTO — web mapping software

Visualisation

• Datawrapper — web dataviz tool
• Flourish — web interactive/dataviz tool
• RAW Graphs — static chart maker
• Infogram — infographic creator
• Datamatic.io — web dataviz tool
• Highcharts — chart library for developers
• Plotly — chart library for developers
• D3.js — library for advanced dataviz
• Mapbox — map maker
• Mapshaper — editor for map data
• geojson.io — editor for map data
• Gephi — network visualisations
• R / ggplot2 — programming language

Colours

• ColorBrewer — collection of safe colour palettes
• Chroma.js — colour palette helper
• Scientific Colour Maps — colour-blind and accurate colour palette