A d3.js Local + Remote Workshop

Testing out Remote Learning Sites

Continuing our efforts to bring bioinformatics training to a wider audience while maintaining small class sizes, we're trying something new! This Friday at noon Eastern/9am Pacific, Emily Dolson will be teaching a half day d3.js lesson to a class at Michigan State University, and we will be broadcasting it to three remote classrooms (UC Davis, University of Florida, and Virginia Tech) using Google Hangouts. Each location will host a room of about 35 students with helpers and a room leader. The role of the helpers will be the usual assistance with questions or computer problems, and the room leader is responsible for making sure that questions are passed up the chain as needed.

In addition to not needing any special equipment, an added bonus of using Google Hangouts is that we are able to livestream the lesson to YouTube via Hangouts on Air; the link is at the bottom of this post, along with time information.

Emily's also made a draft version of her teaching materials available.

Why learn d3.js?

Want to make pretty, dynamic, and interactive data visualizations like http://charts.animateddata.co.uk/ukwind/ and http://mbostock.github.io/d3/talk/20111116/iris-splom.html? D3 (which stands for Data Driven Documents) is a Javascript library that enables you to display data in a flexible way. Since it's a Javascript library, these visualizations can easily be shared either offline or via the internet. The option to add interactive elements to your visualization lends itself to making your data easy for others to explore. The 3-hour workshop will cover the basics of using d3.js to visualize data. No prior web programming experience required (we'll teach you the necessary Javascript and html), but this workshop is aimed at people who already feel comfortable programming in at least one language.

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