Friday, February 24, 2012

More Visualization Fun

Click above to get the latest version of my little chart of RI schools by free lunch eligibility. This is pretty much an exercise in learning D3. I think it has gotten me far enough to do actual work on SchoolTool in D3 next week, but I'll try to come back to this and finish it later.

I guess the one detail which I should probably point out to semi-technical readers is that when you click through to the full version, the graph is being drawn (using SVG) by your browser based pretty much on the raw data dump from the Common Core of Data. Instead of, say, just making a graph in Excel and posting a picture of it, the graph is being generated in your browser. As a result other more interesting things are possible with greater programming experience and skill, like interactivity or applicability to other states' data. In the past this sort of thing was mostly done Flash, but now it works with open standards supported by all current browsers (not IE 8 or before though).

4 comments:

Jill Davidson said...

Mouse over isn't working for me. Wish it were - very cool!

Tom Hoffman said...

Which browser are you using?

Jill Davidson said...

Safari 5.1.3

Tom Hoffman said...

Ah. Well, I guess I'll have to learn the more reliable/complicated way of handling mouseover text.