Data Posters
Nathan over at flowingdata is now selling posters. They’re cool. And you should give him money just for maintaining his excellent blog.
If you like data posters, history shots is cool too.
103 Delegates Today
Getting near the end – Oregon and Kentucky hold their primaries today. Looks like Clinton will win Kentucky (51 delegates). Obama will win Oregon (52 delegates). And Clinton will continue to smoke the high grade and think she can somehow win. I updated the election center and added a summary tab. The tab contains two charts: a pie chart showing current totals; and a bar chart showing how many delegates each candidate needs to win. Most telling is Clinton needs to win 72% of the remaining delegates to win.
Data Viz Talk Files
Here are the files from my BFPUG and Harvard Flash User Group talks. I can’t upload the applications I showed of Visual i|o work, but here’s everything else.
Presention File:
A lot of the middle slides I didn’t even show, but, used as notes while I was demoing the apps.
Download - 10MB rar file. Extracts to Open Office doc.
Here is a PowerPoint version compressed as a zip.
Sample Code:
AS2 Bar Chart – code set up for Eclipse using FDT – to run from Flash IDE – import Main.as and run Main.main(); It also uses SOS for tracing.
Flex Chart Bar Chart example (by Peter deHann) – a great example of how easy it is to chart in Flex. I was going to port the above AS2 example to AS3 – but I’m busy and Flex charting is excellent.
Links to sites I mentioned in the talk:
Intro:
Patraeus Charts – Iraq by the Numbers
National Geographic Ethanol Story
Visual i|o data Viz Wak Throughs
Can’t post what I showed – but here are some examples of our work:
Trends/Mashups:
Chart to Art:
Alex Dragulescu – Spam Architecture
Martin Wattenberg – Shape of Song
Data Visualiztion Talk
I’ll be giving this month’s BFPUG talk. I’ll be talking about Data Visualization and Flash, covering the following topics:
* What questions can be answered by visualizing data?
* What are the advantages and challenges of interactive data vs. static visualization?
* What are the trends driving the current surge in data and information visualization?
* How do you create a visualization using Flash? (walking through code)
The usual location is under construction – so the talk will take place at the New England School of Art Annex – 303 Boylston St. Brookline. Here’s a map.
The T stop is Brookline Hills on the D Line.
Date: Wednesday September 26th @ 7pm.
Digg Public API Flash Data Viz Contest
Digg has launched a public API – and with it, a contest. Great to see another public API – and I think this is the first public API data visualization Flash contest ever. Cool. API developed by Stamen. Looks like first place gets you all the EA Games out there and the CS3 Master Suite. Other prizes include other Adobe CS3 flavors.
Flash Developer Job at Visual i|o
Visual i|o (where I work) is hiring. If you’re interested in data visualization and love to program in Flash, this is the job for you. We are located in Somerville, MA. The work environment is relaxed. And we make cool stuff.
Job description here.
Infoviz Music Video
Nothing to do with Flash. But, this Royksopp video is all info design.
(via infosthetics)
Business Week
Business Week interviewed our CEO Angela Shen-Hsieh a couple weeks ago (podcast here).
We also put together an example swf for them. Article describing the swf here. Click on the Interactive Graphic link to see the swf.
The swf is a version of our bubble chart. The sample data represents leads within a sales organization. The bubbles’ visual attributes (size, color, height) can be set to different metrics. The chart is time based – you can move the date dragger at bottom to check lead status at different times. The chart is also a heat map – areas with higher lead concentrations are darker.
Here’s a direct link to the swf.
A Few Links
Been a crazy month. I will start posting regularly soon. Here are links to two great visualizations and one article that were posted during the last month.
Stamen does more good work with their cab tracking piece.
Kind of related to the Stamen cab tracking is an article in the New Yorker from a couple weeks ago. It describes the methods behind NavTeq, which is the company/technology that makes all the on-line maps work. Interesting to think of Stamen’s viz in the context of the driving directions algorithms. Could cab speeds and road choices be used as traffic indicators – or maybe as the quickest routes from point A to B?
Jonathon Harris (w/ Sepandar Kamvar) also does more good work with “We Feel Fine“. The main piece is done in Java – but, love lines which uses the same back-end technology is in Flash. The visualization is great (not a surprise). But, equally exciting is the effort to structure emotional blog content. Cool stuff.
Lines in Flash 8 – Beware Miter
I finally got to take advantage of the improvements to the Drawing API in Flash 8. They are great. And (in theory) I will blog about different aspects of them soon. But, there is one thing to beware of… setting your lines to Miter. Miter lines draw a lot slower than other lines. Miter is very cool, in that it looks and behaves exactly like a line should – no more goofy rounded edge. But, if you’re doing work with lots of redraw, try to avoid it. (I was writing code for a pie chart where the arcs of the pie slices were being constantly updated by a user dragging a slider.) My tests show miter lines draw about 10x slower. I was hoping to post a nice demonstration example. But, I’m totally swamped.
lineStyle documentation here