Workshop: Mapping All the Way, With d3

Data Community DC (http://datacommunitydc.org/) is excited to be hosting a DataViz Mapping with D3.js workshop on June 3rd, 2014 taught by Jue Yang and Derek Liu.

Overview

There are many tools and libraries you can use to create a map, in this workshop we'll focus on incoporating d3 with map projects. We will take a few example projects and dissect them to show how you can use d3 to create maps with a fast, flexible frontend architecture. You'll come away with a grasp of the kinds of maps you can create, the tech stack you should consider when building each map, and what the trade-offs are.

Outline

To get you familiar with creating maps with d3, we will walk you through our design process and show you a prototype of an web app that uses d3 and Leaflet.js to map millions of rows of mortgage and housing data. We'll also give you a rundown of how we thought through our particular mapping problem, our solution, and what we learned in the process. Prepare for a fraught-filled quest to conquer scary amounts of data that really has no business walking into a web browser!

Other Info

We'd love to spend all day talking about the nitty gritty technical details of using d3 and javascript in the browser, but since this is a two-hour session, be warned that we won't be able to cover all the bases. You should come with at least some knowledge of javascript, and if you've never touched d3 before, you get prepare by following along a few recommended readings below:

If you are looking for specific follow-along tutorials. Check out these well-written ones (http://alignedleft.com/tutorials) by Scott Murray. For those of you more experienced in javascript, we recommend reading Tom MacWright's a fun, difficult introduction to d3 (http://www.macwright.org/presentations/dcjq/). Finally, poking around the d3 example gallery (https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery) is always a good idea to learn and see what's possible.

What to Bring

Besides your powerful technical and cognitive abilities, all you'll need to bring is a laptop if you want to follow along. We suggest signing up for a free mapbox.com account (https://www.mapbox.com/) ahead of time, because you'll need some place to host your maps.

Instructors

Derek Lieu and Jue Yang are front-end developers and designers at Development Seed (http://developmentseed.org/).

Venue

At UberOffices (http://uberoffices.com), we build tight-knit communities filled with inspiring and passionate members. Our offices are home to dozens of amazing small businesses, startups, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/c/7/c/600_363768252.jpeg