Writing

Processing Time

processing-time-200pxSpend your Saturday making clocks with code:

Processing Time

A code jam / party and programming competition
Part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival

Saturday, May 2, 2009 – MIT N52–390
265 Massachusetts Ave, 3rd Floor
Concept

  • Compete individually or in pairs to design and develop beautiful programs in Processing
  • Snack and refresh yourself
  • Present completed projects to other participants and visitors at the end of the day
  • Anyone (not just MIT students or community members) can compete, anyone can stop by to see presentations
  • Meet the creators of Processing, Ben Fry (in person) and Casey Reas (via video), who will award prizes

Schedule

  • 12:30-01:00 pm: Check in
  • 01:00-01:15 pm: Welcome
  • 01:15-05:15 pm: Coding Session
  • 05:15-06:45 pm: Presentations and Awards – Public welcome!

Registration

Register in advance, individually or in two-person teams, by emailing processing-time@mit.edu with one or two participant names and a team name.

Festival

Processing Time is sponsored by MIT (Arts Initiatives at MIT, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies) and is part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival.

The Processing Time page, linked to a nifty poster, is at: burgess.mit.edu/pt

Monday, April 6, 2009 | opportunities, processing  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.