Data Visualization Challenge

Overview

The goal of this project is to learn about open source data visualization tools. My aim is to complete the challenge. This challenge.

Test Project

I wanted to do a little getting my feet wet before working with a massive data set, just to get involved in the idea of visualization.

Anonymized version of my polycule
Anonymized version of my polycule

I created the above, very basic, visualization using XMind. The above is an anonymized version of my polycule. The character polycule from a popular poly comic, Kimchi Cuddles, inspired me to make my own polycule diagram a while back. Now, I’d like to create a nicer visualization for this as a test project for the visualization challenge.

I found this pretty diagram (of character co-occurrence in Les Mis) through D3.js, and I thought that it might work out well as a test project. Go go gadget learning!

Test Project Progress

  • September 26
    • visualization
      • added the Bl.ocks extension for Chrome
      • decided to test the app using the code that’s offered with the Les Mis data
      • attempted just copying in the Index page and then adding the blocks.org URL, but that came up with a 404 error
      • tried the blocks extension, and it said “file not found” (same happened when I tried with just the JSON, which makes sense)
      • added the JSON file to the index file using Add File button, tried the block extension and same error
      • tried making the Gist public (from secret previously) and that also didn’t help
      • checked in with sen, comparing the original gist with mine, and learned that titles of the files are actually more filenames than titles, and that I had done it wrong (I had just called them INDEX and JSON)
      • once I updated the filenames, everything worked just fine
    • the data
      • the biggest roadblock I have starting out, given the tools, isn’t actually that I can’t graph the data, rather, I’m not sure how to work with the data that I have
      • there was a question about this in the GitGist I was using in the above example, someone who wrote “im novice in d3. can someone tell me how you define node , group , value and target.” – using this comment (that was never replied to) as a starting point, I headed back to the D3 site and its associated documentation git
      • luckily, they have a lot of tutorials, so I started out looking here, and here – unfortunately, they weren’t super relevant
      • so I tried looking up the actual data set used for this graph, which gave me good news and bad news (data set found here: this chart is pulled from data that are WAY more complicated than my data are, and, mathematically, doesn’t give me a lot of information on how to group my (much simpler) data set in order to make it compatible with the graph format I’m looking at
      • I also found this, however, an updated data set based on the original (found in the Stanford GraphBase – which led me to think that maybe I need to chart my data, and then parse it to get it into an acceptable format
  • later on September 26
    • after talking to sen about all kinds of things, I decided just to enter the data manually into JSON because the other things I had considered doing were less applicable overall to the data visualization challenge
    • I re-created the same gist that I created above with the test code (copy and paste), changed “miserables.json” in the index file to “polycule.json”, and attempted to modify the JSON for the polycule data by creating a node for each node in the Xmind file, and then assigning the following values:
      • each individual branch on the polycule gets its own group
      • between me and my direct “child” nodes:
        • 1: my pets; 2: my closest partners; 3: my more distant local partners; 4: my long-distance partners; 5: my platonic significant others
        • each relationship involving an other-than-human animal is assigned a value of 1
      • between my “child” nodes, each relationship involving an other-than-human animal is assigned a value of 1, all other relationships are assigned a value of 2
    • copied and pasted into gist
    • generated chart through bl.ocks chrome extension, but it came up blank
    • ran the JSON through a validator, found two errors, and when I corrected them: IT WORKED! I MADE DIS!
      • NOTE: I realized after I generated the graph that the logic of a force-directed graph actually doesn’t work at all for a polycule. BUT STILL. Learning! and pretty.
  • Micki Kaufman Workshop – Gephi, September 30, 2016
    • I did this little practice project during an SCDS Demystifying Digital Scholarship workshop with Micki Kaufman, who worked a bit with this software during the two hour session, and I played with this while Micki talked.
    • what I did:
      • download Gephi
      • watch Micki’s demo (sorry – that I can’t recreate)
      • import data from Text Wrangler into Excel (copy and paste)
      • Text to Columns
      • Remove superflous characters ” and } (find and replace)
      • try to import to Gephi, crash Gephi
      • save as CSV
      • Import to Gephi
      • used this resource from the Gephi git to create an initial render
Gephi

I decided to play with Gephi because of the conceputal flaws in using force-directed graphs to chart polycule data from a politicized perspective. So far, it seems very usable, and I will be able to create something pretty, and perhaps less conceptually flawed, if less 3D and interactive than with the bl.ocks app.

Actual Visualization Challenge

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