Week 4 – Data Visualization

Link to sketch: https://editor.p5js.org/bobbybobbb/full/rBBWMFyxx

When brainstorming for this project, I wanted to represent data in a way unique to the dataset. I wanted to use what the data was about and frame it in a visually engaging way that best represented what it was about. I was digging through Kraggle and found a simple dataset about streaming platforms, so I thought it’d be cool to represent it inside a TV and the glitchy effects of a TV screen. Each bar of glitch/color is proportional to the percentage of shows or movies the streaming platform has compared to the others. Since there were two sets of data, I created buttons on the TV to toggle between them; I really liked how the functionality of the system was tied in to the visual cohesion of the piece. The colors for the glitches are also randomized, so each time you click the buttons, the colors will change regardless of whether or not the dataset changed.

Some challenges I encountered included not being able to pass in arguments to a function I call when the buttons are pressed. To overcome it, I found a way to change the mousePressed function:

showsButton.mousePressed( function(){
  displayData(2);
});

In the future, I want to make this piece more engaging because it feels a bit more static right now. Maybe users can click on the specific streaming platform and learn more about it. Or I can find more data on these platforms and users can see even more data visualization upon clicking each individual platform. Overall, this project came with a lot of testing and looking for datasets. I had to frequently test the spacing of the rectangular bars used to represent each streaming platform, text rotation, and button sizing. There was also a lot of math involved for turning the values in the dataset into rectangles that fit within a confined space.

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