Data-visualisation with Python and Javascript: crafting a data-viz toolchain for the web

To accompany an upcoming O’Reilly book ‘Data-visualisation with Python and Javascript: crafting a dataviz toolchain for the web’ (see here) this talk aims to sketch out the toolchain by transforming some dry Wikipedia data (Nobel prize-winners) into a far more engaging and insightful web-visualisation. This transformative cycle uses Python big-hitters such as Scrapy, Pandas and Flask, the latter delivering data to Javascript’s D3.

While Python is fast becoming the goto language for data-processing/science, the visual fruits of that labour hit the wall of the web, where there is only one first-class language, Javascript. To develop a data-viz toolchain for the modern world, where web-presentation is increasingly mandated, making Python and Javascript play nicely is fundamental. This talk aims to show that the perceived wall between the two languages is actually a thin, permeable membrane and that, with a bare minimum of web-dev, one can get on with programming seamlessly in both.