

Let’s Make a Bubble Map - nthitz
http://bost.ocks.org/mike/bubble-map/

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nilkn
Just yesterday I watched Mike Bostock remake this example live at Edward
Tufte's seminar in San Jose.

In the talk, he emphasized the importance of incorporating Makefiles into the
workflow more than the text of this tutorial does. It basically documents
exactly where you got the data from and what basic transformations you applied
to it. The NYT uses this to streamline their process of developing graphics--
so if, say, a graphic from six months ago needs to be revisited again for a
new story on the same topic, nobody has to fumble around trying to remember
where the data came from, etc. I got the impression that this was the advice
of someone who had been burned by not following it in the past.

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kzisme
Could you post a link to that talk?

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akilism
Nice! I really like building stuff with D3. I just put this up the other day
though I'm still toying around with it. It's a visualization of what precincts
are ticketing drivers in NYC. D3 has made doing stuff like this pretty easy.

[http://uturn.wolvesintheserverroom.com/](http://uturn.wolvesintheserverroom.com/)

~~~
mts_
Wow!

Super cool visualization, and great that you put the code on GitHub for
everybody to see.

For anybody interested in the code behind:

[https://github.com/akilism/moving_violation_scraper](https://github.com/akilism/moving_violation_scraper)

[https://github.com/akilism/nyc-moving-
violations](https://github.com/akilism/nyc-moving-violations)

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rayshan
Perfect timing, just learning how to make a map in d3 for Bower stats [1].
Thought after experimenting with choropleth maps [2], bubbles on maps and
dorling maps [3] [4], dorling maps appear to be the best way to show very
dense info on relationships with vague references to geography.

[1] [https://shan.io/bower/](https://shan.io/bower/) [2]
[http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606) [3]
[http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-
content/files/dannydorling_pu...](http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-
content/files/dannydorling_publication_id0120.pdf) [4]
[http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/dorling-
world/](http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/dorling-world/)

~~~
riffraff
could you explain your opinion?

I'd say the choice between choropleth and dorling maps depends on what sort of
data you want to present, or am I missing something?

What I mean is, if the bubble size represents a different information from the
color depth (i.e. figure 10, page 12 f the dorling paper shows population as a
bubble, AFAICT) than it makes sense, but if it's just another encoding of
already represented information it seems weird.

I.e. in the "dorling world" map I have lost plenty of informations (I have no
idea what northern and eastern europe countries are what anymore, while I can
tell them at a glance on a normal map) but I have not gained anything.

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mungoman
I wonder what the best way is to group populations from neighboring counties.

The east coast has a much higher density of small counties, giving the NY area
a look very different from that around LA.

~~~
resu_nimda
Yeah, this map shows something slightly different (and possibly more
interesting) than population density/grouping. Really it kind of shows which
counties should be split up.

Compare the Houston and Dallas metro areas - Houston has a very distinct large
bubble, while Dallas has more overlapping smaller bubbles which make it look
smaller, even though it contains more people.

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guelo
I find that in general heatmaps are way more informative than bubble maps.

~~~
dmazin
The idea here is to show the bigger process around creating such a
visualization, not the final visualization.

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Sprint
I am wondering why this requires Node.js. Is it just for topojson?

~~~
athst
He uses node for the basic HTTP server to display the visualization, and he
also uses NPM to manage dependencies for the project like TopoJSON

~~~
Sprint
Cheers!

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gavinpc
Obligatory xkcd — oh, wait, this actually is just a population map.

