3 ms·

This tutorial was inspired by John Burn-Murdoch’s popular bar chart race from earlier this year. There have been a couple thousand transitive forks of John’s no

This tutorial was inspired by John Burn-Murdoch’s popular bar chart race from earlier this year. There have been a couple thousand transitive forks of John’s notebook! Our hope with Observable is that reactive notebooks, as a form of literate programming designed for tinkering, make code easier to understand and reuse. Sharing code is already popular today, obviously, but we think helping people better understand that code will foster creativity and innovation.

drewmate 7y ago
Thanks, Mike. This is fantastic. I'm still just learning D3, but this type of content (and Observable in general) has been immensely useful. Where do you get ideas for your novel visualizations? Is there academic literature on the psychology of presenting data like this, or are you just dreaming up new things and adding features to D3 so you can do it? How do you recommend making the jump from forking and adapting others' visualizations to writing entirely new things from scratch?
- mbostock 7y ago
  There are decades of academic literature on visualization and perception: IEEE VIS (and InfoVis specifically), IEEE TVCG (Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics), ACM SIGCHI, and lots more. If you’re interested in learning about visualization I recommend starting with Tamara Munzner’s book, Visualization Analysis & Design: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/vadbook/ https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/vadbook/
ericb 7y ago
Very cool. If the license info was more prominent it might help encourage sharing? As is, I wouldn't fork something I can't use legally as it would be a dead-end. I can't find the word "license" on any of the bar chart pages, so I imagine it defaults to whoever wrote it owning the rights and anyone using it for anything is in legal jeopardy.
canada_dry 7y ago
Observable is an incredibly useful resource and deserves way more attention IMHO. I'm currently using Observable/d3 to develop/test a time based graph of multiple analog channels being read in real-time from an IoT device (i.e. Arduino Mega).

drewmate 7y ago

Thanks, Mike. This is fantastic. I'm still just learning D3, but this type of content (and Observable in general) has been immensely useful. Where do you get ideas for your novel visualizations? Is there academic literature on the psychology of presenting data like this, or are you just dreaming up new things and adding features to D3 so you can do it? How do you recommend making the jump from forking and adapting others' visualizations to writing entirely new things from scratch?

mbostock 7y ago
There are decades of academic literature on visualization and perception: IEEE VIS (and InfoVis specifically), IEEE TVCG (Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics), ACM SIGCHI, and lots more. If you’re interested in learning about visualization I recommend starting with Tamara Munzner’s book, Visualization Analysis & Design: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/vadbook/ https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/vadbook/

ericb 7y ago

Very cool. If the license info was more prominent it might help encourage sharing? As is, I wouldn't fork something I can't use legally as it would be a dead-end. I can't find the word "license" on any of the bar chart pages, so I imagine it defaults to whoever wrote it owning the rights and anyone using it for anything is in legal jeopardy.

canada_dry 7y ago

Observable is an incredibly useful resource and deserves way more attention IMHO. I'm currently using Observable/d3 to develop/test a time based graph of multiple analog channels being read in real-time from an IoT device (i.e. Arduino Mega).