Most of your research will require or even start off with some data, and Google have a powerful tool called Google Public Data Explorer. With this easy to use and visually elegant tool, you can easily control lots of elements to make it more stand out and relevant to your research or your audience, you can set 4 type of visualization ( Line, Bar, Map, Bubble), you can have simple animation control to visualize growth or changes overtime, also you can link or embed the visualization.
As an example here’s a chart on Indonesia Internet users as percentage of population compared to Malaysia and South Korea. There is an embed feature available, but since WordPress doesn’t support iFrame, so I just use a link. Explore the graph and you can come up with lots of ways to start your research.
There’s also Google Fusion Tables, which superimpose data that you and your colleage have on a map.

