I am self-training to do data visualization programming right now. The conference you attended is very relevant to my interests! I hope you had a chance to learn some cool stuff. Nice plane pictures! Ive tried to take pictures of mountains outside the window before, and they've never come out quite as well.
Ah, wow! What kinds of software/code have you been using? They demonstrated some neat visualizations at the conference. One that I liked was a Waffle Chart. I had never seen that one before, but it was a nice, simple visual. I was testing some network diagrams earlier this week.
Have you been working with a certain kind of data? I find that's the hardest part for me - getting the data defined, modeled, and prepared before it can be visualized.
I use mostly free, open source tools. I am focusing on D3.js, which is a framework for creating vis for the web. Right now I'm learning JavaScript in depth so I can make better use of D3. I expect to go back to learning R and ggplot once I'm more solid with D3. If I have time I will try out Tableau. But my aim is to become competent producing interactive vis.
Data prep is a huge hurdle, always. For practice I was working with my own self-tracking data (from Beeminder), which is just CSV. R and D3 all deal with CSV fine, but the tricker part was transforming the data so I could build a visualization. I'm not that great in R yet, so I write a mixture of Python and SQL to do the transformation. For simple data cleaning/rearrangement, I run stuff through sed.
I like waffle charts. They're simple and clear. I think the first time I saw one was in an xkcd comic--maybe the one about radiation? He also did one about the economy that I think also used waffle-like elements. The hand drawn vis in xkcd were part of what got me interested.
Wow, it sounds like you're learning some very useful skills. I'm not working so much with code, though they did show some examples using R at the conference. Best wishes as you keep working with D3 and these tools :)
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Have you been working with a certain kind of data? I find that's the hardest part for me - getting the data defined, modeled, and prepared before it can be visualized.
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Data prep is a huge hurdle, always. For practice I was working with my own self-tracking data (from Beeminder), which is just CSV. R and D3 all deal with CSV fine, but the tricker part was transforming the data so I could build a visualization. I'm not that great in R yet, so I write a mixture of Python and SQL to do the transformation. For simple data cleaning/rearrangement, I run stuff through sed.
I like waffle charts. They're simple and clear. I think the first time I saw one was in an xkcd comic--maybe the one about radiation? He also did one about the economy that I think also used waffle-like elements. The hand drawn vis in xkcd were part of what got me interested.
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