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: