Simon Willison’s Weblog

datasette-vega (via) I wrote a visualization plugin for Datasette that uses the excellent Vega “visualization grammar” library to provide bar, line and scatter charts configurable against any Datasette table or SQL query. # 29th June 2018, 3 pm

Visualizing disk IO activity using log-scale banded graphs (via) This is a neat data visualization trick: to display rates of disk I/O, it splits the rate into a GB, MB and KB section on a stacked chart. This means that if you are getting jitter in the order of KBs even while running at 400+MB/second you can see the jitter in the KB section. # 11th April 2018, 5:04 pm

Vega-Lite. A “high-level grammar of interactive graphics”. Part of the Vega project, which provides a mechanism for creating declarative visualizations by defining them using JSON. Vega-Lite is particularly interesting to me because it makes extremely tasteful decisions about how data should be visualized—give it some records, tell it which properties to plot on an axis and it will default to a display that makes sense for that data. The more I play with this the more impressed I am at the quality of its default settings. # 28th March 2018, 5:22 pm

Observable: An Earthquake Globe in Ten Minutes. Well worth your time. Jeremy Ashkenas uses Observable to live-code an interactive visualization of recent earthquakes around the world, using USGS data (fetched as JSON), d3, topoJSON and an Observable notebook. I’m sold—this is truly ground-breaking new technology. # 31st January 2018, 5:01 pm