I won a free O’Reilly ebook from a hackathon I participated in a while ago. I chose Visualizing Data and I’ve been working through the book. I always find that its more helpful to work on a project of my own that approximates the examples in a technical book instead of just reading or copying and pasting the example code. It forces me to learn new things, gets me more excited about the project and makes me re-read portions of the book in detail.
For a useful time series, I chose one that was close to my life, the list of past Defiance, Ohio shows. It was also useful because I was trying to set expectations for a new job and wanted to let them know how much time I had spent away from home in the past. The original version of this list was pretty messy, so I had to clean it up a lot with Google Refine before visualizing it using processing.
No Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition v 1.4.1 support for APPLET!!
Most striking, you can see how our activity has become more sparse in the last few years. If you’re interested in the code, you can download the processing code.