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We’ve long been making bots with hardware, now we’re making them with software too! They started as simple one-off “report bots.” Basically, helpful commands that anyone in our Slack could use to show useful information like who’s out on a given day, or how much vacation time we’ve taken. We also made a bot where […]

So geographers, in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps And o’er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns This snippet from 18th century writer John Swift’s epic poem “Poetry: A Rhapsody” demonstrates that for centuries we have grappled with the politics of drawing borders, naming places, and mapping. There is no such […]

Each year, on the third Thursday of May, millions across the globe come together to acknowledge and celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an initiative started by Joe Devon and Jennison Asuncion. Devon and Asuncion created the day with the intention for people to gather and “learn about and experience digital accessibility.” Back in November […]

One of the best parts of the Scratch community is the diversity of Scratch projects. Community members have used the Scratch programming language to create many different kinds of interactive applications, from full game engines to music sequencers. One genre is especially unique: Multiple Animator Projects, or MAPs. These Scratch projects compile animations from many […]

Earlier this year, we shared our work on the launch of Scratch 3.0, a major version of the visual programming environment for children of all ages. The new version of Scratch marked a complete rewrite of the runtime in JavaScript leveraging open web APIs. In our previous post, we enumerated the many performance optimizations that […]

Today, we are excited to announce our partnership with JoyLabz, which began in 2017 and has centered around the development of a new game console called GameBender. JoyLabz, developers of Makey Makey and Drawdio, and founded by former Lifelong Kindergarten researcher Jay Silver, has been an incredible partner. We are excited to finally share the […]

Last year we formed a team focused on using the growing number of new web APIs to build multimedia applications that push the edge of the web platform. Our main work in this area over the last 2 years has been with the wonderful team behind Scratch at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK), and with […]

I’m excited to share that our technical partnerships team has developed a deeper focus on graphics and interactive application programming, a focus area which we are affectionately calling Gaia. As of today, Technical Partnerships is now Graphics and Interactive Applications (Gaia for short). In many ways this is a reflection of what this team has […]

Peter Beshai has hung up his Bocoup jersey so that he can continue to challenge himself in the field of data visualization. We wanted to take a moment to talk about why Peter will always be a member of this team, wherever he plays Peter’s first order of business was creating an interactive experience for […]

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 […]

Following five excellent years of service, K.Adam White has left Bocoup. What can you do in five years of participation on the open web? K.Adam’s answer: quite a lot. K.Adam’s main squeeze has always been WordPress. He’d already made a name for himself in that project before he joined up at Bocoup, and he kept […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you are a web developer working on a Mac, you can become a hero for thousands of people out there by assuring that anything you create for the web can be read properly by a screen reader. This blog post is going to teach you how to access and wield this super power that […]

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 […]

Last week, in the first of our series on Accessibility Wins, we looked at setting up a good foundation by using HTML and ARIA roles properly. This week we’re going to dive into the world of making sure that people can navigate your site using their keyboard. Many, many people use just their keyboards for […]

Recent communication apps, like Slack, have lowered the barrier of entry for the use of bots to increase productivity. There are many techniques that I, personally, have tried in the past for time management, but none that I ever ended up fully adopting. Despite that, I always have been fascinated with what my colleagues were […]

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 & […]

At Bocoup we believe that focusing on crafting resilient and accessible experiences is the most effective way to build digital services. This philosophy and practice extends to our learning design. In an earlier post, I talked about building a curriculum framework with a design driven approach—this involved user research, persona and journey map development, and […]

Education and learning have always been a core part of what we do at Bocoup. From our earliest days in Fort Point, we’ve held classes dedicated to teaching people to build on the Open Web, the subjects evolving along with the platform itself. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on a new format […]

Illustration by Sue Lockwood When exploring a new library or language, I like having a clear set of requirements with an end goal in mind. For me, learning new technologies through client work is ideal—I use the project requirements as a guide to push me to do things I might not normally try on my […]

Recently, we announced our Knight Foundation Prototype Grant to work on Data Voyager, a tool for exploring the breadth and depth of a particular dataset with ease through automated visualization recommendations. Data Voyager was originally created as a research project by Jeff Heer’s Interactive Data Lab at the University of Washington (with implementation led by […]

We’ve been very lucky this last month to join the excellent journalists and editors at GlobalPost on their journey to document the conflict in the Middle East. Several months ago, GlobalPost reached out to us for help with several new long narratives they had in the works. The first narrative, which focuses on the state […]

The Bocoup Data Visualization Team is excited to announce the first public release of the Moebio Framework in collaboration with Santiago Ortiz and Moebio Labs. The Moebio Framework is a JavaScript Toolkit for analyzing and visualizing data in the browser. At the core of this JavaScript framework is a set of data types and functions […]

We’re excited to announce the Voyager project as one of 22 recipients of a Knight Foundation Prototype Grant. The grant is designed specifically to support early-stage explorations in media and information aligned with Knight Foundation’s mission to support “transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts.” The goal […]

Our Data Visualization team recently launched a new project called Stereotropes, an interactive experiment exploring the relationships between gender and the words used to describe common tropes found in film and TV. In this post, we wanted to share some of the design process that went into turning the raw trope data into an interactive […]

The Data Visualization Team here at Bocoup has been hard at work building an exciting interactive experience. Today we are really thrilled to share our work with you. Please welcome to the world Stereotropes: Stereotropes is an interactive visualization experiment, exploring a set of “tropes” authored and tracked by a community of contributors on TV […]

The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. LED Matrix signs are everywhere: roadways (even cars themselves!), store awnings, offices, the grocery store deli, airports, train stations, taxi stands, libraries, alarm clocks, and so on. The use cases are so broad because the technology […]

Bocoup recently ran our first-ever OpenVis Conf May 16-17, 2013 in Boston. We were thrilled to bring together 216 developers, designers, and data researchers from around the globe to discuss moving data visualization forward on the Open Web. While data visualization and storytelling are well-established fields, combining these arts and bringing them to the web […]

Open Data, Open Gender Tracker and the Open Web Open data is a core element to building data visualization on the Open Web, driving our ability to reproduce, tinker with and expand visualizations. In a tool like Open Gender Tracker, open data becomes invaluable. Open Gender Tracker relies on name and gender mappings in order […]

This post talks about the development of RapBot, my freestyle 80s battle rap generator. You might want to see it in action before reading on, and you can check out the source code here. For the past year I’ve been using the Wordnik API in my projects to generate random words. I’ve made extensive use […]

Today, we’re saying goodbye to Rebecca Murphey. While we will miss her regular presence at Bocoup, we’re excited to continue working together on community projects as we have in the past. I met Rebecca four years ago when we were both green jQuery developers. I have learned so much from her over the years, and […]

Many people are inspired by the fantastic data visualizations published on the Open Web every day, but the practice of creating these engaging pieces is often shrouded in mystery. The first OpenVis Conf — set for May 16-17 in Boston — aims to change that, with two days of talks focused entirely on the process […]

Today we at the Miso Project are excited to release a new library, called Storyboard, our state management library for control flow of interactive interfaces. As more and more of our code is written in an asynchronous manner, managing the flow of our code becomes more challenging. Event broadcasting and subscriptions is a common pattern […]

Yesterday marked an exciting moment for myself and Bocoup. I spent the day at the White House Safety Data Jam in Washington, D.C., as part of the launch of the new Safety Data Initiative. As one of a group of 40 participants, I was invited to join other top technologists in the country as well […]

Today is Tuesday, May 15th 2012. Just over a year ago, I discovered node-serialport by Chris Williams and went immediately to the closest Microcenter and purchased the Getting Started with Arduino kit. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested […]

Over the past 3 months Bocoup has been working closely with the Guardian Interactive team on the Miso Project, a set of open source libraries designed to expedite and simplify the creation of data-driven interactive content. We are excited to announce the release of the first of these libraries called Dataset. You can see the […]

I feel like I've given jQuery UI a bad rap. I passed judgement too fast. At first glance, it was a pile of rigid prefab user interface objects generated by jQuery being peddled as 'official'. I know now that it's much more. jQuery UI is not (just) about a fancy accordion slider. It's a framework […]

Interactive data visualization falls apart pretty quickly if the machine’s specs are not up to par. The last thing you want is your visualization to be slow and clunky. So when planning the graceful degradation of a visualization across a variety of systems, it is important to put some careful thought into testing things such […]

Bocoup, being enormously generous, gave me this week off to work on the open source project Popcorn.js at Mozilla, Toronto. Popcorn.js is sponsored by Web Made Movies, Mozilla’s Open Video Lab, a Mozilla Drumbeat project. Popcorn will allow film makers to do a lot of cool stuff with html5 <video> such as adding credits, subtitles, […]

Contents What a Difference a Day MakesTesting Processing.jsWhat Works & What SucksFeature TestsComparing SpeedBugs Submitted & Re-OpenedConclusion What a Difference a Day Makes If you have not yet heard the big news, Internet Explorer 9 is shipping with Canvas support! Also with the Video and Audio tags, WOFF Fonts and tons other other HTML5 goodness. […]

.NET Magazine: Mom will be proud! I was asked back at the start of the year by .NET Magazine (Practical Web Design in the US) to write a JavaScript article on the subject of my choice. I doubt you read the article because I went to the stores and bought all the copies. (Had to […]