On March 18th, 2025, the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science hosted a virtual workshop on data visualization with Tableau led by Sean Rogers, the NULab Assistant Director at Northeastern. The workshop highlighted Tableau’s user friendly interface and the variety of visualizations it can create such as maps and time series.
Tableau is well suited to both professional applications and exploratory research work. In the workshop, Rogers demonstrated how Tableau can be used to observe and explore patterns in spatial and temporal data. He also emphasized its broad use in industry. Tableau provides useful capabilities while taking less time to learn than computer programming languages like Python and R, which can also be used to visualize data.
The workshop used building permit records for various Boston neighborhoods to demonstrate how to analyze change over time in particular geographies with Tableau. This data was aggregated by the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) and is stored on the Harvard Dataverse. Rogers demonstrated how to set up data in Tableau. When data is imported into Tableau, it is automatically assigned a data type. Rogers highlighted the importance of checking whether the automatically assigned data types are correct, as the data type determines the forms of operations that can be applied to the data in later analysis. To use Tableau’s mapping capability, Rogers converted a column containing geographic coordinates into a geographic data type.
Visualizations in Tableau are created by dragging and dropping attributes into the rows and columns fields. This then adds them to the visualization. When creating a map, Tableau lets you modify the base map layers to better contextualize your data. The example below shows permit data overlaid on a street map of Boston.
To visualize particular subsets of data, you can add a filter for what data is displayed. Tableau’s data visualization capabilities are well suited to analyzing quantitative data by one or more qualitative features. For example, Rogers illustrated how to develop parallel time series showing the change in building trends by neighborhood.
When developing maps and other data visualizations it is critical to ensure that they are accessible to all potential audience members. Tableau provides helpful resources on accessibility. You can also see our Accessibility in Digital Content handout for more information about accessible design. During the workshop, Rogers highlighted the importance of adding alternative text to images and using high contrast colors and large fonts in visualizations.
Students with an email ending in .edu can sign up for a free student license for Tableau. A list of additional data visualization tools is available on the Northeastern University Library website. The workshop slides are available at bit.ly/Data_Viz_2025 and the example data can be accessed at bit.ly/boston-permit-data. For help with Tableau, please feel free to sign up for DITI office hours at bit.ly/diti-meeting.
