Hello World d3.js London
During our last Londinium MMXII Hackathon some of the participants used d3.js, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.
Here are a couple of examples.
- Olympic Records Evolution = Olympic Medal Count vs. GDP Per Capita, by Year
- The Gap = The Gap between Gold and Silver medals
D3.js is different from other JavaScript graphing libraries (such as Raphael, Google Chart, Protoviz, etc) because it's not a graphing library! Instead of offering an abstraction layer of graphing components, it offers jQuery-like DOM manipulation and an easy way to bind data to DOM. The biggest advantage of this approach (in my opinion) gives flexible way to animate between different visualisation layer or dataset. Here is one amazing example.
I wondered whether other people in London were using d3.js so I decided to hold a drinkup.
We had about 15 attendees, some of whom also attended the Londinium MMXII Hackathon, which is very impressive given that we only had 1 week notice period and changed the date/time/venue twice. Also a few london.js people merged in after their meetup.
Many of us already started playing with d3, and some of us even uses d3 for his/her day job and we discussed our favourite d3 data visualisations - one of the participants suggesting the Obama's 2012 Budget Proposal I listed earlier. There were a few laptops/iphones/ipads opened to show off what we had done and it was a shame that I did not have a chance to look at everybody's work.
With the success of this first drinkup I am thinking about organising a proper meetup in September (or October). The topic of the first meetup is to replicate what we've done (show and tell, lightning talks) with a bigger screen so that all the participants have a chance to see everybody's hacks.
I created a separate Google Group to discuss the meetup, please join us if you are interested.
With a separate note, I also asked the attendees whether we should have "London d3.js meetup" or more broader meetup (eg: London Javascript data visualisation meetup), and one of the participants supporting a d3 meetup said something along the lines of "d3.js represents modern data visualisation techniques and concepts" which I thought is a really nice statement.