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Earthquake data viz demo

I just put together a small demo for the Experimental Interactivity class that I’m teaching this semester at the Academy of Art, and thought I’d post the result. It’s meant to demonstrate:

  • grabbing data from the web (in this case, a CSV file of recent earthquakes
  • altering the data to suit one’s needs (via PHP)
  • writing the data out as XML
  • reading XML into Flash

Pretty simple demo, but not bad for a few hours. All of the earthquakes in the past week are rendered on the map, with a dot that is scaled based on their magnitude. Moving the mouse from left to right across the map causes different quakes to become hidden or visible, depending on magnitude- move left to see small quakes, and right to see larger ones.

To see it in action, and to have a look at the source files (if you want), head here

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