Finished Example

Here is the the finished example of the Database Visualization I have been explaining in the previous 2 posts. A couple of things I added were rectangles based on the engine displacement, a for loop to create a dot representing the number of cylinders for the car and finally a rollover effect so that the viewer can concentrate on the imagery before knowing which car is represented. I don’t know if it’s a useful visualization or not, but I think it is attractive and I will spend more time viewing data like this than a chart.

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Continuing with where we left off in Part 1, let’s start with a bit of data from the cars.tsv file referenced in the Processing File 02 example. BTW, if you are on a Mac, go to your Processing Preferences and check “Place File Menu inside of Navigation to avoid Mac Java bug, that way you can get to these examples very easily right from File>Examples in Processing. Or, upgrade to Processing 1.0.9. Make a new text file and paste this data that I got from the cars.tsv file referenced in the program:

chevrolet chevelle malibu,18,8,307,130,3504,12,70,1
buick skylark 320,15,8,350,165,3693,11.5,70,1
plymouth satellite,18,8,318,150,3436,11,70,1

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I have used Processing many times to import and manipulate database files but I tend to either forget exactly how I did something or not be able to find the kind of instructions I am looking for. I greatly appreciate all of the example’s Ben Fry and others have on Processing and they are important tools in learning to work with data. I would like to provide a one-stop tutorial, reference and explanation for exactly how to get an array of data into Processing and then how to manipulate it for data visualization purposes. And, if possible I will make an extremely simple example so that it is easy to build from here.
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