ddunlop

Last night I start playing with Processing.  I had previously done a little work on a facebook app to gather what friends of mine were also friends.  I had never taken that data to any sort of useful state, so I decided it was time to try and graph those connections.  I decided to try and use Processing which turned out to be nice in some respects, as it nicely animates the spacing for me.  It also gave me some issues which may just be lack of knowledge, such as I ran into a problem with file size as I was attempting to write all my data into one file.  I then tried to use the loadStrings function which I couldn’t get to load data out of the data directory, so I had to fetch it over the web (well from the web server on my laptop).  After that was all worked out I had to draw everything, which went pretty smoothly but I had to play with my gravity metrics to pull people together that are linked and push people apart that are not.  It’s not perfect but I can see distinct groups (Work, Camp, College, High School).  The way I wrote this I place everyone on the screen in a random spot, and then adjust their position based on the gravity, until sum of the error percent stops decreasing.

Update: here is a new version that seperates a little better and adds blue