JULY MEETUP DETAILS!

TALK 1:

Speaker: Greg McDonald

Title: Automating Design Choices in D3 for Unpredictable Data

Description: New startup Vizanda lets users build and share an interactive visualization of their data in seconds. This presents a number of design challenges as the tool tries to make intelligent choices on how to show chart elementsfor never-before-seen datasets. This talk will introduce Vizanda and dive into some of the coding techniques it uses to tackle these challenges.

Bio: Greg is founder of Vizanda, a startup that makes it extremely easy to build and share an interactive visualization. He previously managed the web analytics system at About.com and research operations at ABI Research.

TALK 2:

Speaker: Paul Levande

Title: D3 and State Legislatures: How Interactive Graphics Help Explain Political History, Future Elections, And Gerrymandering

Description: The U.S. Democratic party has a state legislative problem. Despite winning two Presidential elections in a row, Democrats control just 30 state legislative chambers out of 99. How much of this is explained by simple popularity, or historical trends, or unfriendly population distribution, or deliberate gerrymandering?

Despite all the political thinkpieces that have been written about it, relatively few have looked comprehensively at district-by-district details or theoretical concepts. We'll discuss how D3 interactive graphics and canvas animations can help clarify state legislative history, http://xenocrypt.github.io/StateLowerHistory.html#1995,2015

http://xenocrypt.github.io/StateTrendArticle.html

specific upcoming races,http://xenocrypt.github.io/StateLegislativeTargeting.html

and how gerrymanders work (not up yet, but the following gif).