Higher Level Visualization Abstractions

[curran]

D3 gives us the building blocks to build interactive visualizations from the ground up with ultimate flexibility, but are there ways to effectively encapsulate reusable chunks of code that implement common visualization patterns? For example, how many times have you coded the margin convention?

This proposed session will discuss lessons learned and broader goals of the Chiasm Project. This will include a discussion of how functional reactive programming can be leveraged to build composable abstractions for three levels of granularity:

• reactive mixins (D3 margin convention, dynamic resize, scales, axes, brushing)
• visualization components (line chart, scatter plot, bar chart, pie chart, choropleth map)
• interactive visualizations with linked views (linked line chart and bar chart, focus + context plots)

Microscopes let us see tiny things, and telescopes let us see massive things, but what lets us see what is going on in the world at the level of humanity? The broader goal of the Chiasm project, and perhaps of many others within data visualization communities, is to build a machine similar to a microscope or telescope that we can "point" at any domain for which there is data available and see pictures that no one has seen before, giving us new insights into the world in which we live.

One example of this is modifying this visualization of migrant deaths to visualize the recent Paris attacks .

[KristinHenry]

+1

[drifkin]

+1