Initial Posting Due: Tue, Oct 10 at (Canvas Link)
Readings
It’s difficult to know what readings to recommend about implementation stuff, because everyone needs something different. For a lot of people learning about why D3 is the way it is isn’t that important, since you probably won’t use it. That said, I think it’s worth learning something about D3 even if you aren’t going to use since it’s an important tool that lots of people use, and it has some interesting ideas. But it’s hard to learn D3, since you need to know all the stuff it’s built on, and it’s hard to learn about D3 because most things try to teach you to use it…
- To start, read my 2015 rant about why you may or may not want to learn D3. It’s a little out of date (we use Javascript in some other classes now, so I have more experience helping students learn it).
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The D3 paper is an important starting point. It’s the “academic document” that tries to explain why D3 is what it is, and why it’s a good idea. It’s a weird mix of an academic CS paper, with lots of specific implementation details (which are less common in academic CS papers). The paper really is the best way to get the rationale and the key ideas, you just have to skip over a lot of acronyms and buzz-words.
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To understand what D3 can do, there is a huge gallery of examples. Although, the most interesting examples are where it gets used in practice – many of the visualizations you seen in the web browser (that are of the form that D3 can do well) are done with D3. The examples on the gallery page are nice because they show the source code.
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On the D3 web page, there is a huge list of tutorials. I don’t know which ones are good or not.
The O’Reilly Book “Interactive Data Visualization for the Web” by Scott Murray is available on line for free. http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345/index.html This is more of a “here’s how to use D3” book (which might be what you want), but its decent for that. I don’t know if its better or worse than other tutorials. It has an overview of the underlying technologies that you need to know. But Chapter 2 can give you a sense of what D3 is roughly about. Chapter 3 gives a brief tour of the web technologies – it tries to cram an entire class on Javascript programming into a subsection.
If you don’t think D3 is for you (and it might not be), you should still learn a little about it. you can look at 2-4 above, but don’t delve too deep. Instead, read something about some tool or toolkit that you are more likely to use.
Optional
If you want to know what comes after D3…
- Arvind Satyanarayan, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Jeffrey Heer. “Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics” IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis ’16), 2017
Online Discussion
Initial Posting Due: Tue, Oct 10 at (Canvas Link)
Having something to discuss this week is hard, since some people will want to learn about D3 and have the background to actually use it, while others will be less interested.
For your two required postings.
- In a first posting: explain why or why not you may be interested in D3. I don’t mean “you” in general – I mean you the person writing. It’s OK to say that you don’t have the pre-requisite skills (but be specific about what you don’t know or feel like it’s worth learning). If you are thinking of trying to learn D3, describe your efforts to learn from the initial readings. If you are not likely to be a D3 user, talk about what tools you might choose instead.
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Whether or not you are likely to be a D3 user, you should be able to appreciate its benefits and key ideas. Describe the key ideas and why these lead to features that lead to its popularity.
It’s OK if there is less discussion for this week – unless multiple people are trying to learn about the same tool (especially if its D3), in which case you might help each other out.
