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Follow along as we chronicle our work with our partners, the latest news on the web platform, and our efforts to build a more collaborative, inclusive company culture.
  • Getting Started with Shiny

    Jim Vallandingham - July 11th, 2017

    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 […]

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  • Exploring New Technologies for Making Maps (Part Two): Two Fragment Shaders and a Mouse

    Yannick Assogba - April 18th, 2017

    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 […]

  • Smoothly animate thousands of points with HTML5 Canvas and D3

    Peter Beshai - March 16th, 2017

    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 […]

  • Visualizing the Health of the Internet with Measurement Lab

    Jim Vallandingham and Peter Beshai - March 8th, 2017

    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 […]

  • Exploring New Technologies for Making Maps. Vector Tiles & WebGL (Part One)

    Yannick Assogba - February 10th, 2017

    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 […]

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  • Data Visualization at Bocoup, 2016 Recap

    Irene Ros - February 8th, 2017

    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 […]

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  • How are Americans feeling about the election?

    Irene Ros - November 3rd, 2016

    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 […]

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  • Showing Missing Data in Line Charts

    Peter Beshai - September 20th, 2016

    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 […]

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  • Improving D3 Path Animation

    Peter Beshai - September 14th, 2016

    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 […]

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  • Building a Better Lyra

    K. Adam White - June 6th, 2016

    Last year we had a successful Knight Foundation Prototype Grant-funded collaboration with the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab (IDL) to improve their Voyager data exploration tool. At the end of our collaboration we knew we wanted to work with the amazing team from the IDL again, so we were thrilled when Jeff Heer & […]

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