Vizception: Viz in a viz & native d3.js integration on Tableau Server

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Vizception: Viz in a viz & native d3.js integration on Tableau Server

We wanted to show a real example of how to bring more to Tableau Server without additional hardware or hosting needed. That’s right, no additional server purchase requisition requests needed. There are really too many use cases to count when it comes to this, the details herein are only the tip of the iceberg.

We had a few short discussions and landed on the following example. This includes not only native d3.js integration but also an example of viz in a viz (in a viz) on Tableau Server. As a starting point, we used the twitter network graphs that Keith Helfrich and I recently shared, which were showcased on the Tableau bloglast month.

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The Tableau Conference Network

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The Tableau Conference Network

As I embarked on this journey a while back, I had some goals when it came to what I was looking to build. These are summarized in the below bullets.

  • Visualize Twitter network growth in detail using some form of network graph
  • Needed the network graph for each year to be comparable to one another
  • Interactivity against the network graphs was a must
  • Provide a way for the user to view the actual tweets
  • Once Keith and I decided to run parallel with our efforts, we wanted to way to “jump” from one view to the other.

The sections below detail out how I went about trying to achieve each of these goals. Don’t ask me why I gave myself so many of them.

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Note: This is an incremental post to the circular and hive plot network graphing post. When looking back at my network graphing post recently I remembered one piece of the Hive Plot that I wanted to crack and didn't get to in that original effort. One design element that helps distinguish the Hive Plot is the concept of splitting an interconnected axis into two to help visualize this aspect of a network. I think this helps to view the interconnectivity of an axis within the network you are visualizing. Also, with tools like Tableau, we could even allow for an expand/collapse feature on this axis.

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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

There have been a number of small multiple designs (see the list at the bottom of this post) in the past year or so and I am always a big fan of them, I figured why not take a chance at building one myself. If you have read any of my previous blogs, you may have noticed that I like the word “dynamic”, so I tried to figure out a way to incorporate a dynamic aspect into this visualization based on player data from the last six NBA seasons.

Dynamic?
One of the tricks with small multiple design is the fact that you have to lay out the graphs in a trellis panel (aka a grid). This can be accomplished by hard coding and sorting the partitioning dimension of your analysis, however, I challenged myself to calculate the location for each graph within Tableau on the fly. The reason why I wanted to do this was to be able to update, change between seasons, etc. without having to do any additional work on the trellis layout of the small multiple viz.

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Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

After taking a look at the polar clock examples in both D3 and protovis and having studied Bora Beran's great radial treemap & bar chart post it seemed very possible to do this in Tableau with just a little incremental effort. I started from Bora's workbook and went from there.

For the polar clock each radial bar needs to be based on a different unit of time. See the below graphic for how I went about laying out the radial bars and units of time for this viz (mimicking the D3 and protovis versions).

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Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is one of many posts on the subject of Great Arcs which ultimately lead us to the re-make of the 1983 cult classic Wargames in Tableau. I encourage you to read the whole series of posts by the wider team in addition to this one.

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Radial Trees in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Radial Trees in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is an incremental post to navigating your family tree from a few months back. This builds off of that visualization technique to manipulate the tree into a radial view. Also, as with the original, the tree is 100% dynamic and you can reset each node in the tree as the root node, toggle between tree views as well as change the API you are analyzing.

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Navigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Navigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

We are going to build two tree views in Tableau, an ancestor view and a descendant view of a dynamically selected root person. Within this post I will walk through building the ancestor tree (a binary tree), feel free to reach out if you want more information on how the descendant tree was built, but will leave that to the imagination for now.

First things first, the credits. I started this effort with two main inputs, (1) the node tree link diagram that was explained and created by Jeffery Shaffer and (2) thedynamic parameter posts that Nelson Davis recently went through. I rely on both of these to get to the family tree viz shown here. In addition to these, I also askedAllan Walker, Noah Salvaterra and Anya A’Hearn for general help and guidance along the way.

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Comb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Comb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Recently I posted about creating circular and hive plot network diagrams using Tableau and a question was posted around whether we could also execute theBioFabric network graph within Tableau. There is a lot of additional information about the BioFabric network graph at their website. The super-quick demo is a good intro to the graph if you have not seen it before.

The answer to the question posted is yes and this post is designed to walk you through the steps needed to build your own BioFabric graph within Tableau.

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