Observablejs
August 7, 2022 — August 7, 2022
observablejs combines some features of FRP and some of javascript visualisation and UIs and data dashboards into a single tool.
A large friendly ecosystem of interactive browser-based interactive visualisation tools built on top of D3
Observable Plot is a free, open-source JavaScript library to help you quickly visualize tabular data. It has a concise and (hopefully) memorable API to foster fluency — and plenty of examples to learn from and copy-paste.
The result is a kind of scientific workbook with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths:
- “More” interactive than most; the tools can be executed in the browser and that means that interative user widgets are easy
- Light dependencies; it seems to run without a complicated install package like, e.g. python alternatives, and there is a free host for notebooks
- visualisations are rather pretty
Weaknesses
- Statistical tools are not powerful (basically only javascript stuff runs)
- If one of the default visualisations works for you, great, but if not, building a new one is tedious
See the intro.
1 Observable Plot for Mathematicians
Mark McClure explains Observable Plot for mathematicians. tl;dr: It is feasible but we are not the target audience so there is a lot of manual labour. His Adaptive plotter deos a lot of it. See, e.g. his lecture on the normal model.
Transforms are a workhorse for some data processing.
2 Docs I am currently reading
2.1 Plotting
2.2 Interactivity
3 Language
Observable’s not JavaScript * Observable Documentation * How Observable Runs
4 Quarto support
Observable suports quarto, or is that the other way around? See Using Observable.