Blog

Do you know a bit of R and have some data you need to visualize quickly? In this blog post we take a look at Rstudio’s Shiny package and the first steps toward creating a working interactive to explore your data with it. What is Shiny? Shiny is a framework to develop web-based frontends for […]

The Bocoup Data Visualization team will be at the Eyeo Festival in beautiful Minneapolis this week. We’re looking forward to learning, getting inspired, and meeting friends and colleagues from all over the world. If you’re attending too, be sure to say hello! Meanwhile, we wanted to share some of our latest work: In April, we […]

In part one of this series we started learning how to make maps rendered by WebGL, a browser based hardware-accelerated graphics API for 2D and 3D graphics. Our access to this technology was via Tangram, a map rendering library from Mapzen. This post will focus primarily on shaders, those perplexing parallel programs that power our […]

Sometimes in life, you’ve just gotta move thousands of points around on the screen. For hundreds of points, this can be accomplished with D3 through d3-transition on SVG nodes, but this typically becomes too slow when you need to animate more than a thousand points. So how do you do it? Enter canvas. Each point […]

How do you visualize the “Health of the Internet”? This was the challenge posed to the Data Vis team at Bocoup by our client Measurement Lab, a nonprofit that collects millions of Internet speed tests every month from around the world since 2009. This data is invaluable to policy makers, researchers, and the general public […]

Maps are both practical and political. They possess undoubtable utility for navigating the physical world and have a long history of being used to shape and reshape the our social and political conceptions of the world. The ability to mark a territory, carve up a continent (or remember one), count a people, or map our […]

2016 was an exciting year for the Bocoup DataVis team – we wanted to start a new tradition of sharing some of our key highlights, and telling you more about the fun things to come this year. Here goes! 2016 In summary (in no particular order): The very excellent Peter Beshai joined our team, bringing with […]

Much like the rest of the country, we’ve been mesmerized by the election and the coverage surrounding it. This election, more than any previous, has spurred conversations and challenges previously unseen, raising questions around political discourse and campaigning nationwide. We’ve been thinking a lot about those very questions, especially in the coming crescendo of election […]

While working on visualizing the results of internet speed test data for Measurement Lab, it became clear that there wouldn’t always be data for every geographic location on every single day. We might go several days without meeting a minimum threshold of tests, meaning there would be gaps in our data. This is a pretty […]

D3 provides us with many of the basic building blocks needed to make charts in browsers while also making it extremely easy to animate them. One of the most common charts created with D3 is a line chart, often consisting of a series of SVG <path> elements to visualize the data. In this post, I […]