Types of projects

Analysis-focused projects

A very nice to do this type of project is to pick a Kaggle dataset or competition and create an exploratory data visualization kernel.

Examples

Here are some examples of Python exploratory data analysis projects. Most of them are pretty extensive but you can get the idea.

• The Reddit map
• An example machine learning notebook
• Kaggle Competition | Titanic Machine Learning from Disaster
• The Traveling Salesperson Problem
  • Check out other notebooks of Peter Norvig
• SF drug geography
• Getting started with GDELT and Mapping with GDELT
• 538 Election Forecasting Model
• An exploratory statistical analysis of the 2014 World Cup Final
• Sun activity
• Face Recognition on a subset of the Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset
• Apache log analysis with Pandas

Revealing insights into data

The idea is visualizing underlying data as clearly as possible to elucidate your message. Sometimes the data is rather simple, but simply visualizing the data can be an amazing visualization project.

Examples

Society, health, and economy

• Racial dotmap
• Our world in data:Financing healthcare
• How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts
• Where Are The Jobs?
• Watch how the measles outbreak spreads when kids get vaccinated – and when they don't
• You Draw It: How Family Income Predicts Children’s College Chances
• Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares
• Shipmap
• NYT: Mapping Migration in the United States
  • Where We Came From and Where We Went, State by State

Politics

• 538: 2016 Presidential Election forecast
• NYT: 2016 Presidential Election forecast
• NYT: How Birth Year Influences Political Views

Sports

• 538: Lionel Messi is impossible
• 538: Katie Ledecky Is The Present And The Future Of Swimming

Algorithms, machine learning

• Visualizing Algorithms
• A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

History

• The fallen of WWII
• Charting culture

From the previous years

• human development index: A Brief Introduction by Omar Sosa-Tzec

Explanatory visualization

Visualization and animation can unravel complex concepts and procedures, and people have been trying to tap into this power.

Examples

A good example would be 3Blue1Brown's amazing mathematics videos (made with his own software).

Here are other cool visualizations in that sort:

• r2d3:A visual introduction to machine learning
• Mike Bostock: Visualizing Algorithms
• Seeing theory
• Attacking discrimination with smarter machine learning