June 24, 2024 — I engineered on many innovative data science tools, including Grapher and Ohayo[1].
So I was excited to see Observable launch something new: Plot.
Plot is already great on its own. It handles many of the hard parts of data vis, and it's open source, so we can help them fix the parts that are still a little rough.
But I found a way to take Plot to the next level: I combined it with Scroll.
The Plot/Scroll integration is early, but I can already tell it will evolve into a very useful data science tool.
You can now make scatterplots with 2 words.
Obviously you want to add a few more words, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this is the simplest way to generate a scatterplot now and forever will be (until the day when we have mind-reading machines that can generate a scatterplot with zero words).
But enough talk, let's see some code. A tutorial is below.
To follow along, create a new website in 1 second using ScrollHub or install Scroll locally with npm install -g scroll-cli.
planets.csv
scatterplot
planets.csv
scatterplot
title The Planets
table
scatterplot
title The Simpson Family
x age
y height
label name
data
name age height
Homer 39 183
Bart 10 137
Lisa 8 120
planets.csv
scatterplot
title The Planets in our Solar System
subtitle Note: This chart is not designed to be pretty but to show all the current features in the Scroll/Plot integration.
caption Data from Wikipedia.
x yearsToOrbitSun
y moons
fill diameter
radius diameter
label id
symbol hasLife
That's it (for now)!
If you like where this is headed, give us a star on GitHub.
[1] The difference between programming and engineering? It takes programming to make a program that works. It takes engineering to make a program that barely works.