ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part II

Having seen a visualization by Robert Kosara of EagerEyes a loooong time ago, I wanted to try to reproduce it for Switzerland using Processing. This is the second installment of a two-parts post covering this project, in which I will describe how to arrive at the final result, the ZIPScribble Map. I’ll do that in some detail, maybe this is helpful to somebody.

In the first installment of this series I explained my process up to an intermediate result: a map depicting all the postal code locations in Switzerland, like this:

This involved creating a basemap with TileMill, using Till Nagel’s MercatorMap class in Processing, finding and downloading postal code data from Geonames and writing a Processing sketch which makes use of all these. In this second installment I will explain how to arrive at a ZIPScribble Map for Switzerland from the above intermediate result. So from the first part we have many things in place already. What is missing are basically three things: Continue reading “ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part II”

ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part I

Having seen a visualization by Robert Kosara of EagerEyes a loooong time ago, I wanted to try to reproduce it for Switzerland using Processing. This is the first installment of a two-parts post covering this project, in which I will describe how to arrive at an intermediate result. I’ll do that in some detail, maybe this is helpful to somebody.

The visualization is called the ZIPScribbleMap: “ZIP” for postal codes, “Scribble” for rather obvious reasons (as in “it looks like what I doodle while on the phone!”): Continue reading “ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part I”

Terminology is a beast: The many names of visualization

Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has a blogpost about the many terms floating around visualization. It’s worth reading! But, in my opinion, not complete without Robert Kosara’s sometimes constrasting view. Terminology is often flourishing in thriving disciplines where people seek to differentiate themselves and find their niche. It’s probably not that bad, but while potentially adding … Continue reading Terminology is a beast: The many names of visualization