Playing with Processing

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to get back to playing around with technology. Getting to know what is out there so that I don’t get stuck on always using the same solutions to different problems. Today’s technology was Processing. Processing is a programmable environment for interactive graphical interfaces. It’s used mostly for data visualization and a little bit of art.

Why did I end up looking at it? Well, I’m always interested in data visualization. I’m interested because it’s an incredibly hard problem to solve. I’ve worked in the past with some really good people in large dataset visualization and they made me observe how challenging it is. But, at the same time, how easy it is to see patterns when you just have a way to show the data to people. The smarter your visualization technique is, the easier it is to see the meaningful patterns. But even with a silly visualization, data has this natural ability of always exhibit some sort of organization.

So, what do I want to visualize? I’m not completely sure yet. I was thinking of doing something like Buzztracker or what OnlineJournalismBlog but probably focused on trying to see more connections of things and dynamics of the news. It’s going to be hard to get reliable timestamped information, but it’s something that I’ve always been interested.

Another possibility for visualization goes to applications at work. Currently we are doing multiple projects to cleanup the Amazon catalog, but once we deploy new cleanup rules, we have very poor visibility in what it’s doing and where. Having a good interactive visualization mechanism would potentially provide us with data that can be used to improve our algorithms and datasets.

What are my first impressions of the project? I actually liked it. I thought it was straight-forward to do some things and that many of their abstractions for user interaction (the event handling methods and the draw() method) are quite simple to use and can be quite powerful if used correctly. It’s fun how easy it is to write a program that allows you to just click on a screen and get it to draw different shapes depending on the button pressed.

I’m excited so far! More on this when I find more time to play around with it.