D3 Off-Label

Auto-writing Software Good software writes itself. We all know the patterns and following them makes things easy. Not because we have memorized any monumental volume on design patterns, but because years of experience taught us what should be done on an almost intuitive level. Also in a negative sense. We avoid duplication, globals, encapsulation violations. … Continue reading D3 Off-Label →

D3 Fisheye Distortion for Bar Charts

Intro Focus + context visualizations are quite useful when we want to zoom into some part of a visualization, but are unwilling to give up the "bird's eye" view of the entire picture. In this case, we distort the part of the visual on which we want to focus, while preserving the entire view. In … Continue reading D3 Fisheye Distortion for Bar Charts →

Visualizing Crime with d3: Hooking up Data and Colors, Part 2

In the previous post, we derived a class from BubbleChart and this got us started on actually visualizing some meaningful data using bubbles. There are a couple of things to iron out before a visual can appear. Color Schemes I am using Cynthia Brewer color schemes, available for download in colorbrewer.css. This file is available … Continue reading Visualizing Crime with d3: Hooking up Data and Colors, Part 2 →

Visualizing Crime with d3: How to Make Bubbles and Influence People, Part 1

Previously: Visualizing Crime with d3: Intro Data and Visualization In order to make a bubble chart in d3 (the one similar to the Obama Budget 2013), using CoffeeScript, you need to: Download a few files from my git hub (you'll need coffee/BubbleChartSingle.coffee, css/visuals.css, css/colorbrewer.css) Define a class in a .coffee file: I also define a couple of … Continue reading Visualizing Crime with d3: How to Make Bubbles and Influence People, Part 1 →

Visualizing Crime with d3: Intro

Figure a blog without pictures or conversations is just boring, so, here it is. Lately, I have been dealing a lot with data visualization. This was a brand new area for me and while we do use F# for data extraction, all of the front end is done using d3, an amazing toolkit by Mike … Continue reading Visualizing Crime with d3: Intro →