Data Visualization and APIs

Resources

https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/gallery https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock https://processing.org/reference/text_.html https://processing.org/reference/String.html https://processing.org/tutorials/text/ https://p5js.org/reference/#/p5/match https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp

Visualizing Data

The amount and complexity of information produced in science, engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at staggering rates. The goal of this course is to expose you to visual representation methods and techniques that increase the understanding of complex data. Good visualizations not only present a visual interpretation of data, but do so by improving comprehension, communication, and decision making.

This week we'll talk about how the human visual system processes and perceives images, good design practices for visualization, methods for visualization of data from a variety of fields, and programming of interactive web-based visualizations using p5.

Web Sites & Blogs

Flowing Data Visual Complexity Guardian DataBlog The Upshot

Principles

Data comes in many different forms. Finding a good data source can be very challenging. The internet is a vast data source covering many topics, but most often that data isn't organized in a way that's directly useful to us as designers. We might search the internet for databases on some topic we're interested in. If we're lucky, we'll find a database in a common format like CSV, XML, or JSON. A much more time-consuming (but a very common task) is to "scrape" data from a text file, PDF, or webpage. The best case scenario is the work with an API, which is essentially data formatted for distribution by a 3rd party.

Inspiration

Who Wins in the Sharing Economy?
Data at Large
Seeing Through the Fogg
Global Network