Tool: Recapping TimesOpen, HTML5 and Beyond

Coffescript sounds interesting

Recapping TimesOpen, HTML5 and Beyond

Thank you to everyone who came out to the first in this year's TimesOpen series, an in-depth set of talks about HTML5 and related technologies.

Event: TimesOpen 2011: Innovating Developer Culture

Bad timing...

TimesOpen 2011: Innovating Developer Culture

The second event in the 2011 TimesOpen series, Innovating Developer Culture, will be taking place on Wednesday, September 7, from 6:30p.m. - 9:30 p.m. at the New York Times Building. Registration is now open.

Data: Introducing Fech for campaign finance

Nyt has lots of data apis, just hunt a bit.  

Introducing Fech

Introducing Fech, a Ruby gem for parsing presidential electronic campaign finance filings from the Federal Election Commission.

Lecture: perception and cognition (updated)

Folks,

Updated: due to the Monday holiday, our lecture will take place next Monday.

For our lecture on perception and cognition next Wednesday, we will have three readings to react to:

• W. S. Cleveland and R. McGill, "Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation and the Application to the Development of Graphical Models", J. Am. Stat. Assoc., Vol.79, No.387, pp. 531-554, 1984. (ncsu)
• Healey, C. G. and Enns, J. T. "Attention and Visual Memory in Visualization and Computer Graphics."IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, to appear.
• Z. Liu, N. Nersessian, J. Stasko, "Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 14, No. 6, Nov/Dec 2008, pp. 1173-1180. (ncsu)

Jyothi Anumula will lead discussion.

Best,

Ben

Announcement: 761 students leading discussion

Folks,

Students in 761 will begin leading discussion next week. You can see the schedule of who will lead discussion on the lecture notes page. I will also try to note the leader in my lecture posts, where I announce our readings.

You can find my instructions on leading discussion here. Leading discussion need only last about 20-25 minutes, since it will happen before lectures.

Best,

Ben

Tool: Google Chart Tools

Google Chart Tools provide developers access to the static and interactive visualization tools Google has to offer. These tools have existed as bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, etc., as a part of the Spreadsheets application and have been useful for graphically representing data for personal use. 

 

Graphics can now be generated outside of Spreadsheets and displayed on any page you want using Google Chart Tools. These tools allow you to create fully customizable static or interactive charts on your web site by using JavaScript.

Chart Tools are split into two different APIs.

From the Google Code blog:

"1. The Chart API provides Image Charts which are rendered by a Google chart server in response to a simple URL request. Image Charts are fast to render and can be easily emailed and printed. In addition to the extensive gallery of charts, this server now also provides dynamic icons, QR codes, and math formulas.

2. The Visualization API provides Interactive charts which are rendered on the browser using a Google developed JavaScript library. Interactive charts trigger events, providing tool-tips and animations. In addition to a rich gallery of charts, this tool can also read live data from a variety of data sources such as Oracle PL/SQL or Google spreadsheets."

Google also provides a Code Playground with sample charts to make it easy to learn these APIs and generate chart code on the fly.

This example demonstrates the use of the Visualization API to generate a column chart that displays the yearly consumption of coffee for several countries.