In today's age many of us suffer from information overload. However, many artists, data scientist, and developers are turning data into beautiful renderings with data visualization. There are a ton of tools out there that can be useful in the pursuit of creating compelling content such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Qlikview, Tableau, and R but the one I wanted to explore for this lab was D3.js. D3 (Data-Driven-Documents) is a Javascript library, which allows you to manipulate the DOM elements. D3 is used by many for its creative freedom and the ability to create interactive graphics for the web. The library is open source and was developed by Mike Bostock, Jeffrey Heer, Vadim Ogievetsky.

One of the interesting aspects of D3 is that the library is modular so instead of having one large library that contains all the features, D3 has many small libraries that are designed to work together. The modularity enables "micro-libraries" to be easier to understand, develop, and test. Breaking up the library also allows the file size to stay small so that the application is not unnecessarily bogged down.

I have included included an example of D3 in action that can be cloned down from this repo. I came across a lot of very talented people in researching this lab, one of them being Peter Beshai. Peter's personal website includes some projects that he has done in D3. The following link ("https://bl.ocks.org/pbeshai/65420c8d722cdbb0600b276c3adcc6e8#common.js") is a tutorial, where he shows you the source code on how get created an animation loop that takes thousands of points of data. If you are interested in seeing the animation without having to clone down the source code it can also be seen on Peter's page.

Overall, D3 looks like a powerful tool to better visualize the patterns and connections that matter or the significant anomalies. It provides the tool to better design the information so that it makes more sense and tells a story. As we adjust and adapt to how we consume information in the age of big data, Javascript and D3 will enable subject matter to be more approachable through visual representations and ultimately more digestible for the user.

/* You do not need to install anything, nor do you need an API key. It can be deployed Heroku or your PaaS of choice. /*

Further Resources: https://d3js.org/ https://github.com/d3/d3 http://d3indepth.com/ http://sxywu.com/d3intro/ http://dataviz.tools/category/javascript-d3-libraries/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=javascript+d3.js

Want to follow some people that are putting out some great data visualization work? Check out the following profiles and also check out #dataviz.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/datasketches https://twitter.com/nadiehbremer https://twitter.com/sxywu https://twitter.com/pbesh https://twitter.com/ireneros https://twitter.com/mattbrehmer https://twitter.com/Periscopic