Week 9

Working With External Data

In class

• Lumi on Nicholas Felton
• Tufte Chapter 2: “Graphical Integrity”
• A Thousand Suns
  • Review of your sketches and the supplemental data you’ve collected
• Using tabular data with P5
  • the asynchronous csvData() function
  • using csvData() to draw a timeline of nuclear tests
  • using P5’s built-in loadTable() function to do the same thing

References

• Marking functions as async is required if you are going to use await within them
• The old-school p5 approach is to define a preload function in your code and call loadJSON or loadTable from there.
  • Using preload & loadTable
  • The p5 Table class
  • The p5 TableRow class

Assignment

• Read: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
  • Chapter 4 “Graphical Integrity” is on Slack
• A Thousand Suns
  • Clean up whatever spreadsheet manipulation you did to the testing data via pivot tables and the like into a csv-friendly format that has a single header row, 1 set of data per row, and is purely rectangular (i.e., no skipped lines or multi-row/column regions). Save this to a csv in your P5 Editor project’s data folder where your p5 code can access it.
  • Find the external data source you’ll be using for your ‘so what’ and ‘compared to what’ variables and convert it to spreadsheet form. If the data is quantitative in nature, do some exploratory visualizations using the spreadsheet. If it is qualitative, use a vector drawing app to organize the information spatially (for example, sorting similar items into groups and assembling a bunch of categorical lists or assigning a date to each item and arranging them into a timeline)
    • Use Google Sheets for this and save a copy of if to your shared folder
  • Bring in three pencil sketches that show different options for merging the testing data with your external data source. As before, save these images to the shared folder and explain the plan for each in words off to the side of the sketch in the PDF