talk_views_map
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alexdean
Example code to build an interactive animated map of ted.com view data.
Builds an animated map of video views from ted.com data.
You can see it in action at http://youtu.be/omO3fr0XuhY.
Overview
I can't release raw ted.com view data, so please don't ask. Sorry!
This is published mainly as a reference for your own Processing and ruby-processing projects, to show you how I created the map that you see.
There are definitely rough edges, but it shouldn't be too hard to use some of the stuff here to build your own maps from your own data. Feel free to open issues & ask me questions if you want to. If it sounds like some of this would be useable by a few people, I can probably package some of it as a gem.
Installing pre-requisites
bundle install will get you all the ruby libs you need.
rake jars:install will download & install the needed java libraries.
Postgres & PostGIS are used to process the data. You can get installation instructions
for PostGIS at http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/. On OSX, brew install postgis
works pretty nicely.
General flow
All raw data (IP geolocation data, video views data, and some metadata about the
talks) is dropped into the raw_data directory. Some rake tasks ingest & manipulate
the raw data and produce csv files in the generated_data directory. The main
ruby-processing sketch looks for a file in generated_data to use for animation.
Generating data for animation
I ran rake base_data:load output:by_talk_age to build the generated_data/final.csv
which was used in the animation you see.
alexdean