Project 1 / Christie Project 1

Learning MySql, PHP, Raphael, and D3.

Project 2 / Christie Mealo - Project 2

Christie Mealo Project 2 For Project 2 my main goal was to use D3 to create animated data visualizations and visualizations based on external data files. The first two examples, I was jus learning how to animate the data with tranitions and transition chaining; the data was randomized. The last example-- the pie chart-- utilizes an external tsv (tab seperated value) file to call the data. I also used an ordinal scale to create my own custom color palette for the pie chart, which is not as obvious as one might assume. External data files require a server; to make make my example easy to share without setting up an entire web server, I used github gist and bl.ocks by Mike Bostock.

Project 3 / Interactive Map of Sexual Assault Data in NYC

While attending a data conference in October, I was introduced to CartoDB via a talk by the platform’s founder. Being that I love data and work for a travel agency I immediately became interested in the technology. First I experimented with some data pulled from my company’s database records, an example which I have omitted here. After my initial experiment I wanted to try more custom styling with CartoJS; this time focusing on sexual assault, a social issue for which I am more actively involved in generating awareness.

Final Project / Interfacing a Genomic Search Engine

Gene.Ai is a collaborative project between myself and Alex Kamil, a data scientist and researcher at Columbia University. I met Alex by way of online inquiry in the summer, searching for an interesting project to work on throughout the semester that would challenge me to get better with JS and back-end programming. Alex’s project, Gene.Ai, is a genetic search engine used to identify and predict viral and bacterial mutations in medical diagnostic samples. Gene.Ai sparked my social and scientific interest, so I agreed to design the interface, and write some of the front-end programming for the website. This project was, and continues to be, a great learning experience because while Alex knows a lot of back-end programming languages, he is unfamiliar with web development. The kind of website he wanted to build requires server-side scripting beyond basic HTML, CSS, and front-end JS and into more advanced programming, which I wanted to learn. I worked on this project throughout the course and learned how to write code for D3 JS, MySQL, and PHP; through Alex’s encouragement I also started to learn how to use the command line. My goal in this project was to create nice branding and front-end interface as a minimum, while also taking the opportunity to experiment and learn more back-end programming languages. We are still working on the site, I put many hours into what may seem realtively simple, but I have learned so much of what I set out to understand in the process, most importantly D3JS, and also the basic languages and structures of application development for the web.