Working with data, whether networks of individual correspondents, tables of historical financial transactions, literary references, or results from archaeological surveys, can often require interpretation visually. There are a number of toolkits that can deal with specific or general types of data, and these can uncover patterns in your data that would be difficult to infer without digital tools.
D3: Data-Driven Documents
D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
Data Visualisation by
Voted one of the "six best books for data geeks" by The Financial Times. Read the review here.Lecturers, request your electronic inspection copy.Never has it been more essential to work in the world of data. Scholars and students need to be able to analyze, design, and curate information into useful tools of communication, insight, and understanding. This book is the starting point in learning the process and skills of data visualization, teaching the concepts and skills of how to present data, and inspiring effective visual design. Benefits of this book: A flexible step-by-step journey that equips you to achieve great data visualization A curated collection of classic and contemporary examples, giving illustrations of good and bad practice Examples on every page to give creative inspiration Illustrations of good and bad practice show you how to critically evaluate and improve your own work Advice and experience from the best designers in the field Loads of online practical help, checklists, case studies and exercises make this the most comprehensive text available
Beautiful Evidence by
It is also worth reviewing more general texts on the representation of information; this volume is a classic in the field and contains many pointers to effective communication applicable to automated solutions and more manually generated visualisations.
When working with data, it is almost always necessary to spend a good portion of time cleaning and standardizing that data for analysis or presentation. This is especially true when re-purposing data created by others (always ensure you have permission and give due credit). Useful resources for this work include:
There are still many tasks that cannot easily be performed by computers, and especially in the Humanities, the creation of usable research data often involves human intervention, even if on a basic level. Crowdsourcing can often create or enhance research data by asking participants to make judgements about the properties of artefacts, by deciphering handwriting or by interpreting basic information.
The most popular crowdsourcing platform is Zooniverse, which has a variety of projects that you can get directly involved and engaged with, from transcribing ships' logs to understand old weather, to deciphering ancient manuscripts and military field reports.
Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage by
Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their 'crowd'. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.
Crowdsourcing by
A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works.Ever since the term "crowdsourcing" was coined in 2006 by Wired writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms have been labeled with this most buzz-generating of media buzzwords. In this accessible but authoritative account, grounded in the empirical literature, Daren Brabham explains what crowdsourcing is, what it is not, and how it works. Crowdsourcing, Brabham tells us, is an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes set forth by a crowdsourcing organization-corporate, government, or volunteer. Uniquely, it combines a bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. Crowdsourcing is not open source production, which lacks the top-down component; it is not a market research survey that offers participants a short list of choices; and it is qualitatively different from predigital open innovation and collaborative production processes, which lacked the speed, reach, rich capability, and lowered barriers to entry enabled by the Internet. Brabham describes the intellectual roots of the idea of crowdsourcing in such concepts as collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and distributed computing. He surveys the major issues in crowdsourcing, including crowd motivation, the misconception of the amateur participant, crowdfunding, and the danger of "crowdsploitation" of volunteer labor, citing real-world examples from Threadless, InnoCentive, and other organizations. And he considers the future of crowdsourcing in both theory and practice, describing its possible roles in journalism, governance, national security, and science and health.
Data management is the development of processes and procedures to suit a project's, or an organisation’s data requirements; processes and procedures are supported by an infrastructure, to protect and organise information assets. The concept emerged in the 1980s following the move from sequential processing to random access processing. Data management encompasses the detailed consideration of the following areas: database systems, masterdata and metadata management, quality control, integration definition, warehousing, transformation, governance and architecture. A Data Management Framework (DMF) is a system of thinking which allows a user of the Framework to correctly view data related concepts, and such frameworks are often applied in data management.
Data Management by 
Big Data Management and Processing by Data in isolation can only give a very narrow view, whereas Linked Data, which is connected to other resources, contextual data and further authorities, can provide a much broader and richer understanding of a topic. The linking is usually made using permanent identifiers that are maintained globally by these authorities, which can also provide narrative and onward links to other resources that reference them. Examples of authorities include VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) which identifies name references, and GeoNames, which references place-based data.
Linked Open Data is linked data that is offered for use with an Open Access licence, allowing it to be used more widely and often without royalty or charge. Please read the licence carefully and respect the copyright holder's wishes.
Linked Data by 
