Category

processing

02.21.10

Is a flat text file or a database right for an app? CAR, data visualizations, processing, sql | (0)
I've been busily coding away on my final project for my data visualization independent study. I'm looking at data that I've been slowly acquiring on the life of art galleries that were in Chicago in 1990. Back then, the Chicago Artists' Coalition had a complete listing in a pamphlet (more like a book) they put out for artists. It included galleries within the city, in the metro Chicago area, and even downstate. I'm choosing to focus on ones that were within Chicago's city limits in 1990, and I'm looking into what happened to them. Ideally, the visualization will use the ...
02.15.10

Visualizing networking: When it doesn’t work class, data visualizations, processing, programming | (0)
So much in journalism and in life, we strive for perfection in our work. The best story idea, the best presentation. We strive for perfection as individuals, we compete to be the best, get to the scene before someone else, write tighter, edit faster. But sometimes, it’s just as important to recognize when something just didn’t work. I think that’s still an achievement, the real problem is if you think succeeded, when in reality you have failed your audience. That was my lesson of the week. Social networking analysis is a topic that my independent study advisor Rich Gordon and I ...
02.09.10

Treemapping Gov. Quinn’s State of the State class, data visualizations, processing | (0)
This week in the Processing book, I learned all about trees and hierarchies. There's a lot of potential here for allowing the user to delve deeper into interactives by providing multiple layers. This is a very cool example of how programming helps support my theory of journalism -- the deeper the information you offer, the more the user has to explore. You're conveying knowledge, and if you're holding interest, you're keeping eyeballs on the site. But treemapping is most valuable as a reporting tool, I think, making structured data out of unstructured text. This example project is a static ...
02.01.10

Relating zip codes and geography using Processing class, data visualizations, processing | (0)
This week I tackled recreating Ben Fry's Zipdecode project, which he gives great step-by-step instructions for in his Visualizing Data book that I have been following along with this quarter. It's an interesting take on the concept of the scatterplot, even before using its interactive features, it asserts its usefulness as a population density map. Each dot represents a different zip code, and the more zip codes an area requires, the greater its population. This visualization isn't news per se, but could be a valuable reporting tool, helping journalists to understand how visualizations are geographically related, and helping them find ...
01.19.10

Changes in the numbers of students majoring in programming and social sciences CAR, class, data visualizations, processing | (3)
What is a traditional path to programming nowadays? It's a question I've been thinking about a lot, esp. in the realm of the journalist-programmer. So many people from the older school of journalism came through using databases as tools to help with reporting, not because they took a class in it. That's certainly encouraging for someone like me. But that started the wheels turning in my brain -- Are people still getting computer science degrees? Is the major more prevalent now than 5 years ago? 20 years ago? How do the number of comp. sci. majors ...
01.04.10

Reflections on Visualization Theory (Data viz readings, week 1) class, data visualizations, processing, tufte | (0)
In this first set of reading, I learn that the principles of simplicity, accuracy and more are as true in data visualization as they are in a text story. Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, "Images and Quantities" In Tufte's first paragraph of Visual Explanations, he discusses the importance of readability -- a concept I see as having a strong parallel to the usability so often discussed in a more modern era. He breaks down it down into three types of depicting quantities: direct labels, encodings (scales of color) and self-representing scales. I like his breakdown, as I've seen examples of all of theses, ...