[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTZ6SNUa7CA&” hd=”1″ rel=”0″ showsearch=”0″]
Chris Whong
Chris Whong (@chris_whong) identifies himself many ways, but never said to me that he is a Data Visualization Scientist. His job title is Data Solutions Architect for the Open Data solutions company, Socrata, but he credits himself as an Urbanist, Map Maker and Data Junkie. Combining these three allows him to fulfill his passion for putting open data into visual, and particularly Geospatial, displays that have social use.
“It’s always rewarding to take something that started as more of a fun project for me just to see what I could do with a data set and have it turn into some sort of real world impact in whatever industry it’s in, be it transportation, or health, or whatever it is.”
I spoke with Chris at the Data Innovation Day 2014 in Washington DC, presented by the Center for Data Innovation, on January 24th. He was about to present a lightening talk, condensing some of the examples of his use of open data in creating visualizations for the web that are either animated or interactive, or both.
Animated Maps on the Web with D3.js + Leaflet.js + Cloudmade
Chris relies primarily on open source software, such as Processing and D3.js to produce his visualizations. Whereas processing may not have the ability to work directly on the web in realtime, it is useful for creating stand-alone animations, and Chis has posted examples of those on his YouTube channel.
[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6EaMQDHu7Q” hd=”1″ rel=”0″ showsearch=”0″]
In his talk, he concluded that he has grown from being somewhere in the middle of having “Tech Chops” and “Design Eye” to adding more of the “Vision and Storytelling” to make his Data Visualizations go beyond “can I make something cool out of this data” to “why am I making something cool out of this data? What question am I answering?”
