As the thesis week is one week away, everything on the OpenVisuals side is going great!
I am about to finish revising the website, which comes with better usability and more visualizations. I will post the version of the OpenVisuals API soon to the website, just need to fix an issue about importing in the Processing. In the meantime, check out the current data sets and visualizations, play with them to see if you can get an interesting visual out of Primary Elections data.
OpenVisuals is having some break, in order to recover after things got messy with the launch of OpenProcessing. OpenVisuals will be back with fixed bugs, better design and new release of API.
I have been doing presentations on OpenVisuals for a while, and here is my latest presentation file. It’s my first try of Google Docs Presentation by the way, and adding a presentation to a website looks amazing!
So here is a new version of the API. I have to say, it is still far from working smoothly, however you might want to give it a try, since it surely works if you use it the way it is explained in the learning section. You can download it from OpenVisuals Page.
Here is a new feature!
Tags with rss subscription! You can subscribe a tags rss feed in the browse page, so that you can get informed when a new visualization is uploaded with that tag.
Though it might look not worthy enough, I guess it would allow people to gather groups around a tag, like the “nature of code” class tag. This visualizations under this tag includes the ones that are created in the class of “Nature of Code” at ITP, given by Daniel Shiffman. I will be excited to see it working!
Also, it helps me to get informed when somebody uploads something. So.. I love rss…
On the website, many many stuff is up there, live indeed!
Check out the learning and reference section! These pages, as in any API, has the most important part in encouraging users to check the API. I will be on to fill in the gaps (broken links) in the reference section.
New browse page is up! With tags! Now, any visualization can be tagged, which makes it very easy to find in the browse page.
Also, check out this cool visualization, Swirlies, uploaded by Tymm. I couldn’t quite understand what it visualizes, but it looks amazing! If I can figure out how to visualize a dataset using this, I will implement the API, so that you can use it with your datasets.
New version of the API is getting ready, will be up within a couple of days!
I guess, besides the techy posts, it is time to talk more about what OpenVisuals is, why it is there, who it is talking to, how it is being developed…
When we were asked to give a one sentence description of our thesis project at ITP, my response was:
OpenVisuals is an open source visualization platform, and provides dataset owners user submitted open source visualizations, which can be directly used with their datasets within the website. While they are allowed to keep their data private, they can also tweak the visualizations to better match to their datasets. Website also works as a bridge in connecting dataset owners to visualization artist, and allow them to communicate in order to work collaboratively, develop a business relationship, etc…
Since then, I am able to observe the parts that I missed mentioning, and the parts that I over-emphasized. First of all, the mission of the website got lost in the confusion of the terminologies, etc..
OpenVisuals has a mission, which had been already out there, in various parts of the web. There have been a lot of visualization piece/art being developed for various reasons; giving datasets a visual sense, better comparison, etc.. But besides, I believe the ‘visualization’ that we started mentioning in this age of technology and internet is more than just getting meaning out of a data. Visualizations also started to embed personal expressions, points of views. Their datasets changed both medium and context; they can be excel tables but also your conversation around a table (sound), videos on youtube (video), or Bush’s State of the Union talk (text). And even more interesting part is that, creating the right visualization for a data is becoming an obsession. A nice one to have.. And not only Bush is interested in seeing his use of words changing after 9/11 in a visualization, but many people started to seek better visualization for that data that they don’t own. Deforestation information and world hunger level is already out there, but visualizations started to show up to make that data more available, more attractive, more impressive, and in YouTube. Visualization itself started having the mission of delivering that data.
Considering these great visualizations and their data/info/etc.., OpenVisuals suggests to make these visualizations available for everyone, for every dataset.
OpenVisuals also suggests that, that visualization may also work great with this data.
OpenVisuals suggests, more people analyzing a data can create a better visualization for that.
OpenVisuals suggests, that person would suggest another visualization for this dataset owner.
OpenVisuals suggests, this artist would be very interested to visualize that data.
OpenVisuals is a framework for these suggestions to become realized.
OpenVisuals has two major user groups. Dataset owners and Visualization Artists. Dataset Owners are not satisfied with pie charts, and looking for better ways to visualize their data. But defining a visualization artist is a little harder. Visualization Artist is a person who created a visualization, who wants to create one, who thought of a data to be visualized better, who found that nuance while comparing, and who likes to visualize data, share that visualization, or looking for people to talk on the subject. And visualization artist, also prefers developing visualization in Java/Processing environment. Visualization artist wants to show his pieces, and get feedback on how people are using them.
This draft become too long, rest is coming in another post.
Thanks to Daniel Shiffman, tomorrow I will have the opportunity to present OpenVisuals in his class, Nature of Code, in which students are creating very interesting processing applications. I believe, some of them are great examples of visualizations, so this presentation is very important for me.
Here is the pdf version of the presentation, if you guys are also interested.
I am trying to collect sample datasets to test in OpenVisuals.org. As of that, these sample datasets should:
I will use these datasets to make sure that the website (hence the applets) will be able to work fine with them. I currently fetched couple of datasets that would be suitable:
MDF (wood type) Production for Continents per years (gathered from FAO United Nations website)
years subject commodity America + Asia + Europe + Oceania + 1995 Production Quantity MDF 2398000.00 1582000.00 3363300.00 540000.00 1996 Production Quantity MDF 2725000.00 2190000.00 3604300.00 786000.00 1997 Production Quantity MDF 3285036.00 3737000.00 4587300.00 853000.00 1998 Production Quantity MDF 3899694.00 3484000.00 6557913.00 899000.00 1999 Production Quantity MDF 4635000.00 3854000.00 7288500.00 1025000.00 2000 Production Quantity MDF 4773000.00 4652000.00 8380493.00 1241000.00 2001 Production Quantity MDF 5101472.00 8002300.00 9163590.00 1350000.00 2002 Production Quantity MDF 5601924.00 10135100.00 10386690.00 1419000.00 2003 Production Quantity MDF 6327229.00 13970200.00 11110990.00 1627000.00 2004 Production Quantity MDF 7729545.00 18658026.00 11846105.00 1639000.00 2005 Production Quantity MDF 7751384.00 24133523.00 12704400.00 1622000.00 2006 Production Quantity MDF 8467770.00 27017523.00 13383800.00 1635000.00
In the table above, the generated dataset set is not delimited with comma, but tab spaces (although the file is .csv). This also happens when you copy paste from Excel.
Also below, is a very typical example of a dataset with empty cells (unknown data), though the content is one of the most popular ones lately.
"State","Barack Obama","Hillary Rodham Clinton ","John Edwards","John McCain ","Mike Huckabee","Mitt Romney","Ron Paul" "Alabama",10,19,0,16,21,0,0 "Arizona",21,25,0,50,0,0,0 "Arkansas",3,10,0,1,29,1,0 "California",155,195,0,146,0,3,0 "Connecticut",26,22,0,27,0,0,0 "Delaware",9,6,0,18,0,0,0 "Georgia",22,12,0,3,45,0,0 "Illinois",68,35,0,54,0,3,0 "Kansas",15,6,0,,,,0 "Massachusetts",38,55,0,18,0,22,0 "Missouri",36,36,0,58,0,0,0 "Montana",,,,0,0,25,0 "New Jersey",46,54,0,52,0,0,0 "New Mexico",12,14,0,,,,0 "New York",80,121,0,101,0,0,0 "North Dakota",,,,5,5,8,5 "Oklahoma",14,24,0,32,6,0,0 "Tennessee",14,24,0,19,25,8,0 "Utah",14,9,0,0,0,36,0 "West Virginia",,,,,18,0,0 "Florida",,,,57,0,0,0 "South Carolina",25,12,8,19,5,0,0 "Michigan",,,,6,1,23,0 "New Hampshire",9,9,4,7,1,4,0
Here is also the imported version of this dataset in OpenVisuals.org .
I exported Javadocs from the current version of the API that I have been working on. My goal is to find actually a better automatic documentation, like the Reference of Processing. I learned that (source: Daniel Shiffman) Ben Fry is using some kind of self-built Javadoc parsing application to generate their reference pages. So I am in search, and if you know something, put a comment!