XConf 6 - Data, My Heart!

Mon, Jul 16, 2012

Last Saturday, Srijayanth Sridhar (@craftybones) and I gave a talk at XConf, ThoughtWorks India’s internal conference series.

We talked about visualising data, and the various visualisations that one could use to answer questions about the dataset you have. We looked at two particular datasets - one showing the consumption of juice at the fresh juice counter in office and one about Indian and Pakistani players. We looked at various visualizations like Area charts, Box Plots, Chord Diagrams, Line Charts, Pie Charts, Donut Charts, Small Multiples, Spark Lines, Stack Charts and Treemaps.

The talk went well and we got a lot of good feedback. I thought it was an engaging session for the audience because the visualisations we showed revealed a great deal about juice consumption in the office.

I am waiting for the video of our talk to be made available. Last time I gave a talk at XConf, I made a lot of stupid mistakes like saying “Right” a many many times. I believe I did not make the same mistake this time. But I will have to wait and see.

Putting together this talk took a lot of effort, the biggest of them being the process of typing out large number of ledgers. We had planned to visualise about 6 months worth of data, but ended up using only 1 month’s worth. We learned a lot of things in the process.

As usual, Srijayanth did most of the hardwork, while I helped put together the visualisations and the presentation, which incidentally used deck.js. Thanks, man!

You can take a look at the presentation here. The code for the whole thing can be found here on Github.