Introduction

We are all living in an information age, where data is created in huge amounts every day. This excess amount of data is in dire need to be presented in a format that is accessible by the users.

This chapter will cover some common ways of doing animated data visualizations with minor interactions. Most of the examples will be data-driven documents, bounded to the page with D3 as well as with some other methods of animated data display.

Note

Throughout the book we use D3, so it is good to know some of the origins of it. Mike Bostock, the brilliant core author the library, has created it as an successor to a library that he created during his Ph.D. studies called Protovis, taking into account the web standards and making performance improvements. He also has an amazing visualizations list mostly done for the New York Times available at his site http://bost.ocks.org/mike/.