Happy 2014! In between celebrating Christmas, hanging with family, and ringing in the New Year I managed to put together a visualization of the words used on avc.com. AVC, written by Fred Wilson, is probably one of the most popular “start up” blogs on the Internet. It covers a wide array of topics from “MBA Mondays”, USV portfolio companies and of course general startup and technology news. Given the range of topics and and that the blog has been active since 2003, it naturally seemed like generating a word cloud would produce interesting results. With the goal of generating word clouds in mind, I set off the day after Christmas.
Checkout the finished product at http://symf.setfive.com/d3_avc_blog_cloud/. I actually decided to use Scala to scrape and process the data, look for a follup post on coming to Scala from PHP.
Taking a quick glance at the clouds, a few things do jump out:
Posted In: Demo
Tags: avc, d3, scala, visualization
Last week, we got our hands on the class list for the Spring ’13 Startup Institute class. I had some time to burn so I decided to throw together a visualization using the names and email addresses of the members of the class. You can check it out at http://symf.setfive.com/d3_startup_school/
Basically, the visualization represents every student with a 3×3 color grid by using various attributes of their names and email addresses. The various squares are calculated with the following formulas:
Technically, the squares are drawn using the d3 library and the page layout is done with Bootstrap.
Anyway, as always comments and feedback are welcome.
Posted In: Demo, Javascript
Tags: d3, fun stuff, javascript
D3 is a “newish” visualization library that has been getting a lot of attention recently. The New York Times has been using it extensively to create visualizations, and in fact its creator is currently employed by the NYT. I’d been meaning to take D3 for a spin for a while but couldn’t find a dataset I wanted to play with until a few weeks ago.
At the end of November, the LA Times published a dataset titled Capital appreciation bonds which highlighted how various California school districts were funding various projects with extremely high interest rate bonds. The LA Times described the data as:
Hundreds of California school and community college districts have financed construction projects with capital appreciation bonds that push repayment far into the future and ultimately cost many times what the district borrowed. Government finance experts consider bonds imprudent if the total cost is more than four times the money borrowed or the maturity period is greater than 25 years.
Anyway, you can check out my attempt at a visualization here.
Posted In: Demo, Javascript