Kepler Family Life Spans is my first original data visualization using processing. Since the summer, I’ve been more interested in processing as a tool, data visualizations and generative art as well as my own genealogical history. So naturally, I wanted to figure out some way to visualize some of my family data. This project enables you to select a year starting with the earliest birth year that I have for my ancestors that I have a birth date and death date for. For each year, you can see the average life span for my family at that point all the way up to 2011. When a person dies, their representation goes red and stops progressing in age.

With this little project, my goals were to learn how to integrate data into processing, use the geni.com API to grab my genealogical data, and create something that was visually interesting. Because I was concentrating so much on the data aspect, it ended up not being as visually interesting as I planned on, but now I’m better equipped with the “how”, so that next time, I can concentrate on the cool factor a bit more.

As for the some interesting conclusions that I’ve come to, you can see the expected rise in average life span, thank goodness. In fact, the oldest person that has passed away was this year, with my grandmother at 96 years old. Also in the recent years, I thought it was interesting to see a 10 year gap in new babies, where with a family where I have cousins almost as old as my parents and as young as their mid 20s, I thought that there would be a baby born every year or two. Of course this data probably isn’t all that interesting to anyone outside of my family, so that brings me to what I plan on doing from here.

Since this data comes from what I’ve included in my geni.com account, I plan on making my work public so that other people can plug in their geni credentials so that they can come to their own conclusions. And with that, I will also need to make a javascript version or app so that people can actually use it. I also hope to figure out ways to improve on this and keep it updated as well as continue exploring how to visualize this data in interesting ways. I’m sure that there are more fun and interesting conclusions that can be found from this data too.

In the next post, I’ll go into what went into making this and what I learned from the process.

I have a habit of picking up new things to try when I want to do things I could accomplish with the tools already at my disposal. This weekend, I spent a bit of time with ruby-processing . It runs everything in Ruby, and uses JRuby as a bridge to run Processing. I used it to visualize some data about web developers after parsing the original .xsl file into .tsv files and cleaning up the data using Python. Im going to do quite a bit more work on the visuals above, but I wanted to put in a good word for ruby-processing now.

The first thing that I liked was that I wasnt writing Java, a language lots of people seem to hate on, the source of which hate I am coming to understand as I learn about other languages. Rubys syntax is cleaner, even if it seems strange at times (welcome home@,$,and:prefixes).

The next big improvement over vanilla Processing was writing the code inside of TextMate. This isnt inherent to ruby by any means; I could probably write Java inside of TextMate. However, ruby-processing made it really easy to launch sketches I was working on, and also to edit them in real-time.

I also spent some time messing around with field on Saturday. It looks like really exciting software, with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it bogged down and became unusable while running through the examples on their site. Ill probably give it another go, but ruby-processing is letting me make what I want to for now (and thats what is really important).