A master list of resources and tools that have helped me work or that I find useful or neat. Installation files are for Windows versions of open-source software mentioned below, but follow the link to the website for Linux or Mac versions.
Agriculture & Environment
- Ag Data Commons by USDA - data catalog and repository available to help the agricultural research community
- Ag Risk & Farm Management Library - library that includes budgets and other resources for farm management
- Dairy One - dairy feed composition library
- Gridded National Soil Survey Geographic Database - soil data for US in raster format
- Integrated Farm System Model - helps model impacts on nutrient cycling and net returns to integrated systems like dairy and beef farming
- SoilGrids - soil data across borders
- Statistics for Soil Survey - course on soil stats
- SWAT+ - Soil and Water Assessment Tool for modeling process in watersheds
- Web Soil Survey - online portal for getting soil data in US
Data visualization
These resources and people show how data becomes useful information, and how to do it beautifully.
- Alberto Cairo - Alberto Cairo’s blog about information design and visualization. His work sort of reminds me of Edward Tufte in a way
- Andy Kirk’s Master List - Andy Kirk has a blog but also put together a more substantial list of data ‘viz’ resources than I have provided here
- cmocean - color palettes for oceanography, or possibly water quality
- Data Driven Documents (D3) - The D3 Javascript library is widely used for web-based data viz
- Dataviz Project - a guide of data visualization
- Data to Viz - a guide of data visualization caveats
- Datawrapper - create solid and clean data visualizations in minutes
- Draw My Data - make a scatter plot by clicking
- Edward Tuft - someone who I think has good philosophies for data visualization
- FlowingData - data visualization and paid tutorials by Nathan Yau
- Flourish - I have not used this yet, but it is suppose to turn your data into stunning charts, maps and interactive stories
- Giorgia Lupi - info designer that has an exceptional talent with hand-drawn visualizations. Who said data viz had to be digital? See also Dear Data
- Happy Hues - trendy, modern color palettes
- Jonathan Corum - someone for data visualization inspiration
- Matplotlib - Python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures.
- Nadieh Bremer - beautiful web-based, interactive visualizations.
- Our World in Data - research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.
- Paletton - a color scheme design tool that helps people like me choose colors that actually go together.
- PhotoChrome - impressionistic color palettes.
- Plotly - interactive plotting platform. Don’t have to learn JavaScript or anything. Use online or through an API.
- Polygraph - an incubator for visually driven storytelling.
- RAW - the missing link between spreadsheets and data visualization
- Tableau - interactive data visualization with public (install) and paid versions. FREE for students
- Viz Palette - Another visualization palette picker, that like the others includes many colorblind friendly options.
- Werner’s Colors - gorgeous presentation of colors from a time in which colors were more deeply connected to nature because people were more deeply connected to nature
Data Art subset: Spatial data visualization
- Adventures in Mapping - blog by John Nelson with spatial visualizations
- Sarah Bell Maps - like John Nelson, a cartographer with good visualizations
- Joshua Stevens - visual communicator with a background in data science and cartography
Data Science & Statistics
- Adventures in Cognitive Biases - fun way to be introduced to Bayesian statistics.
- Best Practices for Statistical Data Analysis - sure it’s from UVA, but the information is actually pretty good.
- Choosing the Correct Statistical Test - from UCLA comes a nicesummary of tests. Run whichever one confirms your theories.
- Data Analysis Examples - and actual examples of how to actually do certain statistical data analyses, because hands on is better.
- NEON’s ‘Work with Data’ - data lessons, background materials and other resources that support working with large spatio-temporal datasets.
- Neural Network Playground - ah, so this is how neural networks work.
- Randomizer - free resource for researchers and students in need of a quick way to generate random numbers or assign participants to experimental conditions.
- Tabula - a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files (install)
- Web Plot Digitizer - extract data from plots in digital formats by Ankit Rohatgi. Web-based version available in addition to desktop. (install)
Organization, productivity, research, writing
- Cal Newport - his Study Hacks blog supports his books and efforts to help people focus on more meaningful deep work.
- Conversion tools for words, pages, minutes, and so on. Two examples included.
- Convert Words to Pages
- Speech - Words to Minutes - helps you estimate speech/presentation length. But practice, too, because no one likes presentations that go over.
- Dillinger - online Markdown editor that can link to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
- Endnote - powerful, but expensive research management software; syncs to the cloud. Integrates with Word.
- GitBook - a modern and simple solution to documentation, digital writing and publishing.
- Google Scholar - search engine for research. Works especially well if linked with university library credentials.
- Classic Papers - Google scholar’s list of papers that have stood the test of time (since 2006).
- Hemingway Editor - makes your writing bold and clear.
- LibreOffice - open source version of Microsoft Office, basically.
- Maintaining a Lab Notebook - because you probably won’t remember things well.
- Mendeley - manager + networking + data sharing + job searching
- Microsoft Academic - academic content from over 120 million publications.
- Overleaf - collaborative writing and publishing; uses LaTeX and rich text.
- Papers - use to be ReadCube, reference manager apparently now limited to MacOS scholars.
- RefWorks - manager that stores references in the cloud; integrates with Dropbox, Google Docs, and Word.
- Scott Young - blog pieces from the guy who earned a four-year degree in one year.
- Semantic Scholar - search engine for research. Has some features that Google Scholar lacks.
- The Most Dangerous Writing App - don’t stop typing, or all progress will be lost.
- Zotero - a free, easy-to-use tool for collecting, organizing, citing, and sharing research references. My preference over Endnote. (install)
Programming (general)
- Atom Text Editor - text editor that can do Markdown as well (install)
- Codecademy - learn Python
- DataCamp - learn how to do data analysis with Python or R
- GitHub - online service for managing code and projects
- also with a GitHub desktop client (install)
- GitKraken - desktop Git client for managing code (with cool colors)
- Julia - homepage for Julia programming language, which I have no experience with.
- Markdown Table Generator - just input the data, and then copy-paste into markdown document.
- Python - homepage for Python programming language (install)
R Programming
- R - programming/statistics language. Link to one of the CRAN mirrors to download R, now in version 4.0.2 (install)
- RStudio - A desktop IDE for R; the only sensible way to work with R. (install)
- DataCamp - learn how to do data analysis with R
- Effecient R Programming - online book
- Exploratory Data Analysis with R - online book
- Google’s R Style Guide - guide for writing and formatting R code in a consistent, readable way
- Hadley Wickham’s Style Guide - guide for writing and formatting R code in a consistent, readable way
- Quick-R - R reference and tutorials
- R for Data Science - online book; a great intro to R, data science, and some tidyverse packages for R
- R-Bloggers - R News and tutorials
- RDocumentation - site with summaries and information about R packages
- Swirl - learn R with tutorials that run inside R through the +swirl+ package
Spatial
- ArcGIS - the gold standard of GIS?
- DroneDeploy - software related to drone remote sensing
- EarthExplorer - site by USGS for getting spatial data, such as Landsat imagery
- GeoDa - open source software for spatial analysis and statistics (install)
- Google Earth Pro - Google Earth but with more features (install)
- Intro to Spatial Analysis in R - open course by the CDRC
- Pix4D - software related to drone remote sensing
- QGIS - very capable open source GIS software (install)
- SAGA GIS - open source GIS software for geoscientific analyses
- Smarty Pins - a Google game of geography
- Spatial.ly - blog by James Cheshire about mapping data with R emphasis
- TopoTopo - search the world for a slice of terrain, and export a file for 3D printing.