Writing

Glagolitic Capital Letter Spidery Ha

spidery-170x205.pngA great Unicode in 5 Minutes presentation from Mark Lentczner at Linden Lab. He passed it along after reading this dense post, clearly concerned about the welfare of my readers.

(Searching out the image for the title of this post also led me to a collection of Favourite Unicode Codepoints. This seems ripe for someone to waste more time really tracking down such things and documenting them.)

Mark’s also behind Context Free, one of the “related initiatives” that we have listed on Processing.org.

Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.

Grammars are covered briefly in the Parse chapter of vida, with the name of the language coming from a specific variety called Context Free Grammars. The magical (and manic) part of grammars is that their rules tend to be recursive and layered, which leads to a certain kind of insanity as you try to tease out how the rules work. With Context Free, Mark has instead turned this dizziness into the basis for creating visual form.

Updated 14 May 08 to fix the glyph. Thanks to Paul Oppenheim, Spidery Ha Devotee, for the correction.

Monday, May 12, 2008 | feedbag, languages, parse, unicode  
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.