/materializing-data

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Turning Data into Matter - ITP Camp 2014 workshop

Processing sketch - step-by-step setup

  • Download Processing 2
  • Download this code ("Download ZIP" button to the right)
  • Open the data file (/data/2014/campers.csv) and replace the data with your own.
    • Be careful to remove whitespaces around commas, and to wrap strings in double quotes ("Firstname Lastname").
  • Run the sketch : /visualizations/campers_2014/campers_2014.pde
  • Press 'p' to generate a PDF of the sketch.
  • Put the PDF on a USB dongle and load it in the laser cutter (ask a councelor if necessary). Change the strokes 0.1 pt width.
  • Laser cut your stuff!

Slides

These are the slides shown in class. You can simply read the html of the .html files in the /slides/ folder for an idea of the topics covered. Or you can run the /slides/ folder as a website on your localhost. Ask a concellor or another camper for help setting that up :)

Going further

  • EASY: project about mapping running data to a medal with similar Processing code that creates a final laser-cut artefact.
  • ADVANCED: And another personal Processing project that creates a 3D form instead, for 3D printing.

Resources

  • Books/Learning
  • Tools
    • Pre-compiled collection of various tools here
    • Libraries:
      • Hemesh: 3D mesh generator
      • ga2csv: PHP script that translates Google Analytics data into CSV format. Was used in Bert's project to visualize GA data on a poster design.
      • PHP Simple Html Dom Parser: PHP script to scrapper HTML data from a website. It's already in this repo, and was used for scraping the camper data from last year's camp.
    • Other languages:
      • Processing.js : a port of Processing for the web. Allows to play Processing sketches in the browser. Doesn't likely support all of the features, but at least some.
      • D3.js: popular Javascript framework for building interactive dataviz projects. Used extensively by the New York Times.
      • DimpleJS : an abstraction of D3.js for beginners. Never tried it but seems useful to get your feet wet.
    • Software/Apps
      • Raw : web app. Give it some data, and it will automagically produce embeddable charts for you. Chart types are limited but it's a good way to visualize your data quickly, to get a sense of it. Lacks basic chart types, oddly.
      • Tableau Public : desktop app used in workshops by Moritz Stefaner to quickly produce various types of charts of a dataset, to initially get a sense of the data. Never used it myself, but it is quite famous.
      • OpenPaths : mobile app fmor the New York Times that tracks your GPS position so you can export the data and use it for visualizations.
      • Repoter iOS app : iOS app by Nicholas Felton that helps track data about where you are, what you doing, etc. Useful to build a large dataset about your everyday comings & goings, but slightly annoying.
      • Insta-Mapper : another mobile app that tracks your GPS data constantly.
  • Data resources
    • NYC OpenData : bank of free data about NYC, from banks to government to housing.
    • World Bank Open Data: bank of free data about innumerable topics of global development.
  • History lesson
  • Examples & artists