Deliverables 07 (Due 11/04)

This set of Deliverables is due at the beginning of class, Friday November 4.

There are 5 parts:

  • 1. Reading (excerpts by Edward Tufte)
  • 2. Research: Review D3 Blocks
  • 3. Looking Outwards #07: Information Visualization
  • Visualization Projects
    • 4. Warmup: a Map (CANCELLED)
    • 5. Visualization. (…This is the “main” assignment)

Also, some reminders:

  • Hiroshi Ishii Lecture, Thursday 11/10
    http://www.design.cmu.edu/designthefuture/hiroshi-ishii/
    I strongly recommend you see this lecture by Hiroshi Ishii, professor at the MIT Media Laboratory. He’s been a leading innovator and pioneer of tangible media and physical computing for more than two decades. His lecture will take place Thursday 11/10 at 5pm in McConomy.
  • Georgia Lupi Lecture, Saturday 11/12, 7pm in Carnegie Library
    https://www.carnegielibrary.org/event/dear-data/
    Georgia Lupi directs a world-class information visualization studio in New York City, and has made a large amount of lovely, heartful and impactful work. She has also been an Eyeo speaker in 2013, 2014, and 2015. You should secure your free ticket beforehand at this URL.

1. Reading: Excerpts from Edward Tufte.

  • Please read chapter 1 from this collection of excerpts from Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This is about 20 pages of reading, most of which is pictures.
  • There is no writing or other deliverable for this reading assignment.

2. Research: Review D3 Blocks.

Please review the following sites of D3 “Blocks” (demonstration examples):

3. Looking Outwards #07: Visualization

Our Looking Outwards topic for this week is computational information visualization. You are asked to identify and discuss an interesting project in which an artist, designer or other researcher has created custom software in order to collect and/or visualize a dataset. Some persons you might wish to consider include:

There are also a number of collections and prominent blogs specifically devoted to documenting computational and interactive information visualization, including:

Please name your post nickname-lookingoutwards07, and use the wordpress Category, LookingOutwards07.

Visualization Projects.

For this set of deliverables, we will be using data from Healthy Ride PGH, and visualizing it using D3. This data describes the rides, riders, and bicycles that are used in Pittsburgh’s municipal bike rental system. The data can be found at:

4. Visualization Warmup: a Map

This sub-assignment has been CANCELLED. 

As a warmup, you are asked to create a cartographic map from this data set.

You may find the following code example(s) helpful:

5. Visualization:

You are asked to create a visualization, preferably something other than a map, which reveals something interesting about the Healthy Ride data. Your job is to:

  • Be curious. Ask an interesting question of the data.
  • Develop craft. Successfully adapt the data to a suitable D3 Block, in order to answer this question.

Take a look at these sorts of examinations that Todd Schneider has created:

D3 Resources

Don’t forget, you’ll need to run a local server on your laptop in order to have D3 load and display files. On a Mac, you can use this command:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

More information about running a local server can be found on the p5js website here.

Here’s my “countRidesPerStation” Processing + D3 tutorial:

https://github.com/golanlevin/countRidesPerStation

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