Tribune libre de Pierre Hanne, (licence 1 ESIEA) en stage à ARNUM sur la data visualisation:
Data and dataviz
Data isn’t just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts. It’s a creative medium that we can exploit in various ways. « I would say that data is the new soil » As David McCandless said at TED meeting in 2010. In 2014, only 40% of the world’s population is connected to the Internet said ITU. Every year, data growth increases. Therefore we have to develop dataviz. It’s an easy way to remember and understand things. With this option of viewing the data we bring out different points that can be useful for communication. Then we can use dataviz to analyze data to get facts.
What about D3js ?
D3js is a modeling tool from a JavaScript library created in 2011. It creates documents based on data saved in JSON, GeoJSON, CSV format. One good point of D3js is that we can manipulate DOM as we want. Moreover D3js uses HTML, CSS, and SVG to transform data. Therefore you are free to design your data visual interface. You can use CSS to personalize color, shapes, to create shapes you have SVG, in addition, you can create interactions and transitions with Javascript. However your creation only works on the web.
D3 good choice for dataviz ?
D3js can model everything because it uses many languages from W3C. However even if we need a more powerful product, we can add other libraries. DOM manipulation can be extremely slow for a large number of entries. Also SVG has performance limitations when dealing with large quantities of elements. Nevertheless it’s still an amazing tool which is really powerful. So this is a good one !
Exploration sur la data visualisation par Pierre Hanne