Processing: Interactive Data Visualization

Course details

Start communicating ideas and diagramming data in a more interactive way. In this course, author Barton Poulson shows how to read, map, and illustrate data with Processing, an open-source drawing and development environment. On top of a solid introduction to Processing itself, this course investigates methods for obtaining and preparing data, designing for data visualization, and building an interactive experience out of a design. When your visualization is complete, explore the options for sharing your work, whether uploading it to specialized websites, embedding the visualizations in your own web pages, or even creating a desktop or Android app for your work.

Learning objectives
Exploring the need for creative data visualization
Drawing basic lines and shapes
Introducing variables, strings, and arrays
Modifying drawing attributes such as color
Making drawings more dynamic with animation loops and spirals
Creating keyboard- and mouse-based interactions
Adding images, video, and sound
Reading in text or XML data
Creating plots and charts
Publishing and sharing your work

Concepts

Introduction

welcome
what you should know
using the exercise files

Basics of Visualization

overview of data visualization

Reading Data

using embedded data
working with appended text data
working with appended tabular data

reading xml data

Varieties of Data Visualizations
generating dot plots
building scatter plots
making line plots
creating bar charts
checking out examples of maps, hierarchies, and networks
Elements of Design for Visualization
introducing some principles of 2d design
understanding color theory
Elements of Interaction
interacting with zooming, rotating, and sliding
implementing slicing

using rollovers

introducing the gui libraries
Publishing and Sharing
sharing via openprocessing and other sites
saving as a desktop application
saving as javascript
saving as an android application
Basics of Processing

installing processing

overview of processing
exploring libraries
Basics of Drawing
basic setup
drawing points
drawing lines
drawing ellipses and circles
drawing arcs
drawing rectangles and squares
drawing quadrangles

drawing triangles

drawing polygons
drawing simple curves
drawing complex curves
drawing bézier curves
Variables
introduction to variables

understanding variable scope

modifying variables
creating arrays
modifying arrays

creating strings

modifying strings
Drawing Attributes
incorporating randomness
using perlin noise
shuffling with java

specifying line attributes

changing placement modes
understanding color attributes and functions

exploring color spaces

using color palettes
transforming the grid
exploring the attribute matrix
Dynamic Drawings

building code blocks

writing a while loop
using for loops
creating conditionals
working with easing
creating spirals

Interaction

mouse tracking
hovering and clicking

understanding keyboard interaction

Media
specifying fonts
using images
playing a video loop

exporting video

adding sound
Grouping Code
creating functions
creating classes and objects

Conclusion

where to go from here