Show HN: Word Tree in D3.js

I see so many cool visualizations built with D3.js these days. All the libraries I used to build visualizations in the past were very limited and using them involved many tradeoffs, but D3.js seems just about limitless in what it can do. I can't wait to be able to give it a try. Too bad my company standardized on visualization toolkits some time before D3.js became a viable option.

Re: Show HN: Word Tree in D3.js

#8

Post by jQueryIsAwesome » Tue, Mar 12, 2013, 3:05 PM UTC

Doesn't work in Chrome 25 in W7

    XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/alice-in-wonderland-by-lewis-carroll/versions/1.txt. Origin http://www.jasondavies.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.
    Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Time-out) http://www.jasondavies.com/xhr?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww-958.ibm.com%2Fsoftware%2Fdata%2Fcognos%2Fmanyeyes%2Fdatasets%2Fobama-war%2Fversions%2F1.txt

Re: Show HN: Word Tree in D3.js

#9

Post by chevreuil » Tue, Mar 12, 2013, 3:25 PM UTC

Very cool use of transitions, one of the many fields where d3 really rocks. However, I've always wondered if word trees are really usefull... Sure it makes nice things with the Luther King speech or extract from the Bible.

Re: Show HN: Word Tree in D3.js

#10

Post by sopooneo » Tue, Mar 12, 2013, 3:26 PM UTC

ghc wrote: post #7

I see so many cool visualizations built with D3.js these days. All the libraries I used to build visualizations in the past were very limited and using them involved many tradeoffs, but D3.js seems just about limitless in what it can do. I can't wait to be able to give it a try. Too bad my company standardized on visualization toolkits some time before D3.js became a viable option.

My finding with D3 is that it chooses to give you power at the expense of ease. So you can do almost anything, but very little is simple. For most of it, you pretty much have to make all the shapes yourself with SVG, then use D3 to tie their dimensions and location to the data. So you have to know SVG from the get go. That's not a problem. It's a little weird with what it considers CSS stying vs node properties, but is otherwise straightforward enough. As long as you go into learning D3 with this in mind, and don't come at it as equivalent to other user friendly graphing libraries, it's amazing.