Playing with Data
In this workshop, we’ll be learning how to make interactive images of data with Processing, a free and open-source programming environment found online at processing.org.
We’ll start with a handful of examples that look at different kinds of data, with a focus on how to adapt these to your own projects. We’ll also cover ways to represent information–whether maps, charts, or something less conventional–and talk about the programming basics of working with information interactively.
comments
Thanks, Mark!
Anyone out there with particular ideas of what you'd like to see covered?
Hi there – I think the course description sounds great. I am new to Processing (read the ‘Getting Started…’ book-thanks for that)! I would love to walk away from the day being able to create sketches based on data that I am working with (which could start in a database, an Excel or text file, or XML). In particular, I am working with multidimensional arrays of mortality information (by age, time, risk factor, etc). Really looking forward to the course!
Terrific, thanks for the note. That's well in line with what I had in mind... anyone else?
Hey all you Data Players!
You will need to bring a laptop to this workshop.
That is all. Carry on.
Ben, your work comes highly recommended from a colleague who was a student of yours at Carnegie Mellon. I'm looking forward to getting into the mechanism and the philosophy of Processing.
I was curious what do you think about Processing.js? Do you consider it a "blessed" alternative or a rebel faction gone rogue?
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the iterative process of authoring & improving a visualization i.e. how you've seen people go from initial sketches to particularly effective visualizations.
They're a blessed rebel faction gone rogue. We're excited about a plugin-free future of being able to post things online and having them run directly in the browser. We're also excited about not having to install anything to get started with Processing--we got them to hack a version of processing.js to work with Bespin so that you can do a simple editor right in the browser: http://sketch.processing.org/
There's also a number of ports to other languages--Scala, Ruby, and most recently, Python--that are all useful depending on your goals. We can talk about this more on Wednesday.
Will be sure to cover the iterative side of things, and I'll try to show some projects in steps.
On some level you can consider this a day-long Q & A session, so the more questions you have, the more interesting it's going to be for all of us.
Hi Ben,
Interesting presentation today, and the gene browser was very impressive. For tomorrow's workshop I'd be interested in any insights on how Processing can deal with real-time data. Thanks.
Rob
Excited for this workshop!!!!