Nien Lam

Mandala is a visualization of the connections between your Facebook friends. The application allows you to filter and inspect your social network. Mandala uses the Facebook API to gather your friend information. You can tap on each colored block to show your friend information. Mandala also supports pinch zoom. The connections slider allows you to find friends with the most or fewest connections.

Here is an example of how to parse the XML file generated from an iTunes playlist.
You can get the file in iTunes by going to File -> Library -> Export Playlist.
Then choose XML as the file format.

import processing.core.*;
import processing.xml.*;

public class MusicDataViz extends PApplet
{
	private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

	public void setup()
	{
		size(300,300);
		frameRate(24);

		parseMusicXml();
	}

	public void parseMusicXml()
	{
		// Get iTumes XML file.
		XMLElement xml = new XMLElement(this, "music.xml"); 	

		// Get dict node that has all the track information
		XMLElement tracks = xml.getChild(0).getChild("dict");

		// Walk through each track and print out track information.
		// The way the xml is formatted, we need to inspect every other child.
		for (int ii = 1; ii < tracks.getChildCount(); ii += 2) {
			XMLElement trackInfo = tracks.getChild(ii);

			// Print out "Key : Data".
			for (int jj = 0; jj < trackInfo.getChildCount(); jj+=2) {
					print(trackInfo.getChild(jj).getContent());
					println(" : " + trackInfo.getChild(jj+1).getContent());
			}
		}
	}

	public void draw() {
		background(255,0,0);
	}
}

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statics
The United States department of labor publishes all of the data they gather (Employment, Unemployment, Pay & Benefits, etc). Here is a good visualization using the data.

iTunes Playlist
iTunes allows you to export your playlist in xml. The file contains everything you setup in the View Options in the application (Artist Songs, Genre, Year, Play Count, etc). The data could be used to create a visualization of not only your own playlist, but also of all playlists from a group of users.

Visualizing “The List”
The ITP listserv is a place where anyone in our community can post messages. The messages can range from something useful to something complete inane. Nonetheless, it provides a glimpse into what ITP students are talking about. Data points, mapped to a particular student, we can gather are daily avg frequency, # of posts started, # of posts responded, avg post size, etc.

Living Situations of ITP students
Where do you live? How big is your apartment? How much rent do you pay? How many roommates do you have? Common questions we ask each other at ITP. Doing a visualization of this data could help you figure out where lie on the spectrum.

Twitter Data Visualizations
Twitter feeds provide a wealth of information we can easily mine. Searching on keywords and hashtags are some of the powerful things you can do with Twitter. What’s particularly interesting is seeing the network diagrams showing the relationships that exist among users. Here is an application for visualizing connected users.