Processing Interim

I decided that since I have now created several examples of fully-fledged programs in processing, I should go and learn about the full capabilities of the language. To do so, I am taking a break to read through "Processing: A Programming Handbook," the official guide to Processing, as written by its creators.

I'm learning a lot about the fully capabilities of the language, and perhaps equally important, getting a solid review of key concepts in computer programming.

Real World Data

The next Chapter of "Visualizing Data" address real life data, and how it can often be messy and difficult to parse. As such, most of the information in this chapter deals with background processes. Topics included: Sifting through website source code to find the files that actually contained the desired data, regular expressions to parse data files, and creating strings to store the relevant information for future use.

The project for this chapter dealt with correlating baseball teams' win-loss record to their salaries. After going through all of the data, we reached this basic sketch:

There wasn't a whole lot of work put into refining the image, but the following image does use color to differentiate the sign of the correlation, width for the magnitude, and a couple of spacing/typography improvements:

Time Series Graphs

Today I worked through Chapter 4 of Visualizing Data, titled "Time Series." In this Chapter, we got into the actual mechanics of creating a solid graph, in that in contains all of the necessary components to clearly illustrate the data. Half of the chapter covered nitty-gritty details, such as axis labels, tick marks on the axis, or small lines on the graph to give the viewer a sense of scale.

In addition, the chapter covered various methods of actually presenting the data in question: a series of points, a series of line segments, a smoothed line, a combination of points and lines, a solid-color area, or a bar graph.



We even added in a mouseover function to display the value of data points when moused over.


The original graphs were drawing from a table of three different subjects; Coffee, Tea, and Milk. Originally the user was able to access the different graphs by scrolling through via the "[" and "]" keys, but in the final exercise we added tabs up top that responded to the user's mouse clicks.