Research analysis and curation tools

The Web offers different tools to help you analyse, curate and visualise data.

The following is a selected list of tools. Please feel free to suggest new tools to include, or give feedback on the tools listed here. Tools are listed in categories. Need collaboration tools? Find them here.

Analysing and visualising

	Tableau Public ^{A tool that can be used to convert spreadsheets into graphs, tables and maps which can be displayed on blogs or websites. Data is hosted on Tableau servers (which can cause problems with institutional firewalls). Data is live, and any updates will immediately feed through to wherever the data is displayed. The software shows to best advantage with numerical data. Requires download and installation.} ^{Reasonably intuitive. The paid version might} ^{be too expensive for individuals.}
	Crowdmap ^{A Web-based tool that allows you to crowdsource information from tweets and blogs and visualise it on a map and timeline. A Ushahidi platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time.} ^{"Interactive map, dynamic timeline and real time data tracking"} ^{features. No need to install.}
	^{Many Eyes A Web-based visualisation tool developed and provided by IBM Research and IBM Cognos sofware group. Users can use existing data or upload their own. Free registration.} ^{A useful tool to visualise public data sets mainly from USA such as the US Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve or to create visualisations from one's own data.}
	Google Charts ^{Free interactive charts and data tools.} ^{No plug-in needed, cross-browser compatibility and cross-platform portability to iPhones, iPads and Android. Users would need good understanding of JavaScript DataTable class and the Chart Tools Datasource protocol}^.
	Google Refine ^{A tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases. The software must be downloaded and installed. Need to learn the codes to use it effectively.} ^{Potentially useful especially if you want to transform data from one format to another, e.g. from a Web source to .csv or Excel. Will take time to learn to use it effectively.}

Curating Web-based data

	Curated.by ^{A free web-based tool which allows you to collect and organise topic-based content (media, links, tweets) into bundles to save and share.} ^{If you are a regular Twitter user, or if you collect a lot of material on iTunes, then this might be a solution to help you organise it more systematically. Easy to use.}
	Chirpstory ^{A Web-based tweet bundling tool that allows you to embed Twitter bundles into web sites and blogs. You need to sign in to use the service.} ^{Useful for collecting and sharing tweets. Easy to use.}
	Storify ^{A Web-based social media bundling tool to facilitate curation and story telling from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, Flickr and Google. No need to sign in.} ^{Very easy to use.}