Creating Animated Bubble Charts using D3 version 4!
This repository contains code to create your own animated bubble chart using D3v4.
D3 version 4 has some significant API changes - especially to the force layout, which is used in this bubble chart, so this is great news for any bubble lovers who also want to use the latest and greatest D3.
If you are still using D3v3, but also like bubbles, check out my previous bubble chart tutorial
An associated blog post for lessons learned in switching to v4 is in the works.
A live version of this code is here:
http://vallandingham.me/bubble_chart_v4/
D3 needs to be run from a web server due to how it imports data files.
See more here: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki#using
To run this visualization locally, navigate to the directory you checked out to, and run the following:
$ ./run_server
The first line will build the image.
The next line will mount the repository into the /app directory, set the working directory to /app, map host port 3000 to container port 3000, and run the image tagged d3:latest.
Try visiting http://localhost:3000 in a browser.
Bubbles might not be the answer to your problems
While the bubbles are flashy and are fun to watch move around, they may not be the best visual form to display your information in. In most cases, when bubbles are used to encode a single variable, the two dimensional bubble inflates and obscures the one dimensional value it is attempting to display.
Kaiser Fung hates bubble charts. You can see lots of reasons why here: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/bubble_chart/
Just keep in mind when you are working with your data: Bubbles aren't always the answer.