Skip to Main Content

Network Analysis & Data Visualization for Humanities and Social Sciences

Visualisation tools

  • Tableau 
    Tableau Public is a free visualisation tool aimed at online publishers and academics. It can be used to create an interactive visualisation, and also enables users to publish it to the web as an embed or share it via a link. Tableau is a desktop-based application. A one year free license is available for students and teachers.
  • Google Ngram Tool 
    The Google Ngram Viewer is a free, web-based tool affiliated with Google Books. It displays a graph showing how a set of user-supplied phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over a selection of years. The tool includes functions for part-of-speech tagging, ngram compositions and word dependencies, to name a few.
  • Circos 
    Circos is a free visualization tool for creating publication-quality infographics and illustrations. Its visualisations are arranged in a circle to facilitate exploring relationships between objects and positions, which also has the benefit of offering a high data-to-ink ratio. Though promoted for the sciences, it is highly flexible and can visualize datasets from a wide variety of fields.
  • RAWGraphs 
    RAW Graphs is an open source data visualisation framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone.
  • yEd Graph Editor 
    A powerful desktop application that can be used to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams. Create diagrams manually, or import your external data for analysis. The automatic layout algorithms arrange even large data sets with just the press of a button.
  • Voyant
    An online open-source tool that provides a suite of text analysis tools that will work with most texts you can upload or find on the web.
  • Concordle
    A free, web based word cloud and concordance tool. You can paste text into the provided box and generate a word cloud, concordance or list of words ordered by frequency. It also includes a field for stop words.
  • Bubble Lines
    Creates proportionately sized circles in SVG format by manually entering terms and values.
  • Word Tree
    A free, web-based tool for generating dynamic word trees from texts. You can paste the text directly in the box provided, enter a URL or Twitter handle in the search bar. Within the visualization, you can generate trees for any keyword based on search or from a click in the interface.
  • WordCloud
    Wordclouds.com is a free online word cloud generator and tag cloud creator.  Paste text, upload a document or open an URL to automatically generate a word- or tag cloud. Customize your cloud with shapes, themes, colours and fonts. You can also edit the word list, cloud size and gap size. Wordclouds.com can also generate clickable word clouds with links.

For general text mining and visualisation tools and corpora see the Text Data Mining guide.

  • DataMiner Scraper
    Data Scraper Chrome plugin extracts data out of HTML web pages and imports it into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
  • TweetBeam
    ​A free online tool that creates a "Twitter Wall" to visualize the conversation around your a hashtag or topic.
  • TweetsMap
    Analyzes and maps geographical location of one's Twitter followers. A free plan is available.
  • Twitonomy
    Online analytics platform for detailed study of users' Twitter activity, followers, mentions, retweets, hashtags, links. 
  • Mentionmap
    Online tool that shows an interactive social network graph of a Twitter user's mentions of other users.

Librarian

Profile Photo
Sandy Hervieux
Contact:
McLennan Library Building
3459 McTavish Street
Montreal, Quebec H3A 0C9
514-398-1087

McGill Libraries • Questions? Ask us!
Privacy notice