Class 10 – 2017-03-21

Class 10 of 14

Three more working classes. Four weeks until projects are due.

Final Data Due Today

Today in class you should have your final data in some format. Ideally this would be a CSV or JSON file format. Please keep this checklist up to date with your progress.

What everyone should be thinking about:

• What questions do I still have about my work?
• What is going to go wrong in the next 4 weeks?
• What happens if I drop my laptop?
• How can work efficiently / smartly?

Working in small vertical slices:

Its tempting to work on 'complete' stages of a large project like this. Instead, try to think of 'round trip' experiences which are incomplete, and imperfect. For example before trying your visualization out on a large data-set, extract a few items to experiment with. When experimenting it is important to itterate quickly from failure to failure. Part of learning quickly is not obsessing about details you know you can address in an attempt to discover the problems we don't know about. One way to reduce friction and speed up learning cycles is to reduce the amount of data we experiment with.

Things the 'online interactive' people should be thinking about:

• Can I read my data (CSV, JSON) into a javascript file?
• What kinds of problems might I have with HTML / CSS / Javascript?
  • Do I have some one I can go to for help?
  • Do I know how to find answers on my own?
  • What kinds of tools will I use to figure out what is going wrong?
• Where / how am I going to put my work online?
  • Recommendations:
    • Surge -- Requires that you install node.
    • BitBalloon
    • github
    • Others?
• Do I know which Javascript libraries can help me do my work?
  • Recommendations:
    • D3 – Most common library for creating online data-driven visualizations. Has ultilites to manipulate HTML pages, load data, and restructure data.
    • jQuery - Famous library, makes updating web pages using javascript simple. Has other useful functions.
    • lodash – Utility belt for working with lists / arrays / objects.
    • Others?.
    • For larger projects, or the curious, I would recommend people look at React. Learning curve for react and required tooling might be too steep for this class, but I would be willing to demonstrate / talk about it.

Things the 'poster / article' people should be thinking about:

• What wall can I use to show my poster?
• Where does your data live?
• If the data changes, can I quickly respond?
• Can you automate the tedious parts of this process?
  • What tools are available to automate illustrator?
    • your
    • ideas
    • here
  • What are the most tedious parts of this work:
    • your
    • comments
    • here
  • How will you stay sane?
• Can I also publish my static work elsewhere (article / web page / campus news)?
• What happens when that nice printer breaks just before posters are due?

Exercises:

Example of weather CSV data.

1. Update the checklist
2. Draw your data in the format it is now. What is the structure? What are the field-names? How is it organized?
3. Draw your data in the best possible format for your visualization.

For next week:

1. A rough vertical slice of your visualization. It doesn't have to look anything like your final project, only prove that you can: read in data / transform it / use it to display something. You will find problems in this process. Persist, and get something from your data in a your final mediuim. Take notes about the problems you encounter. We will discuss those next week.
   • Use actual sample data, collected however you intend to collect all your final data. Be prepared to describe this processes.
   • Only use a few (1-4) samples. Don't try to use all the data.
   • The visualization must not be pretty. This should be embarrassing to show.
2. Technology planning:
   • Identify the technologies you are going to be using.
   • Schedule a 5 minute slack checkin with me:
     • 6:30 - 7:00 Wed & Thur.
     • 9:00 - 5:00 Friday & Monday.
   • Find a friend or mentor who will be available to help you if you get stuck. Ensure they are familiar with your tools.
   • Follow an online tutorial to get setup with the tools.
3. Slack me a link to your data files.

Working in class.

Get to work trying out layout's mockup for your data.