Data Globe

A more generic version of https://github.com/dataarts/armsglobe for visualizing source/destination data.

This fork attempts to make the globe data-agnostic so that users can simply provide source/destination data and have it graphed.

Building

To build this application you'll need an up-to-date copy of Node.js, Grunt CLI, and Bower. Once all these are installed, simply run the following from within the dataglobe directory:

$ npm install
$ bower install
$ grunt

And everything will be built for you.

Running

To run this application, ensure Node.js has been installed along with all the dataglobe dependencies (see "Building"). Once the application has been built, run:

$ node app.js

And it will start a development server for you to view your work. In addition, you can also run

$ grunt watch

To have it watch for changes and automatically rebuild.

Data Format

The visualization expects data to be of the following format:

[
  {
    "src": <country name>,
    "dest": <country name>,
    "colour": ["r"|"o"|"b"|"g"|"p"],
    "time": <timestamp>
  },
  // ... etc.
]

Acceptable country names can be found in country_iso3166.json. Timestamps can be anything that is convertable to a JavaScript Date.

Data does not need to be in any particular order; the visualization takes care of sorting the data by date for you.

TODOs

• Allow source/destination data to be specified as lat/long, rather than country names
• Implement touch/pointer events for use on tablets/phones
• Consider updating repo to use es6 with Babel, rather than CoffeeScript
• Highlight the destination country when the particle "hits" it
• Create subtle trail effect for particles