Interacting with the TrelliscopeJS displays
1. Interacting with the TrelliscopeJS displays
You've gotten a peek at what the output of a TrelliscopeJS display looks like. In this lesson, you will learn how to interact with them.2. Scalable faceting
TrelliscopeJS provides an interactive interface for scalable faceting by not requiring you to look at all of the panels of a visualization at once, but allowing you to interactively page, sort, and filter the panels in a targeted way to help zero in on the most interesting spaces of a visualization. In this example, we see that the panels are by default sorted by the faceting variables, country and continent, and that we are looking at 6 countries per screen. We will learn how to change these settings to view the visualizations in more meaningful ways.3. Paging
The most basic functionality of the TrelliscopeJS viewer is the ability to page through the panels of the display. This can be done by clicking the "prev" and "next" buttons in the header, or by using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. Paging, without regard to how the panels are sorted and filtered, is often a useful operation to begin with, as it allows us to get a quick feel for how similar or different the visualizations are across panels. Here, we can see that faceting on country does indeed give us the ability to better inspect the country-level life expectancy trajectories, where we can notice more clearly the dips in countries like Cambodia, as well as some countries that start to decline in the 90s.4. Grid layout
It can be useful to make multiple visual comparisons at once, or sometimes to just focus on one panel at a time. We can rearrange the grid layout by clicking on the "Grid" button on the left toolbar, or pressing "g" on your keyboard. Here you can specify the number of rows and columns, as well as specify whether the order of the panels should flow by row or by column.5. Labels
Several panel-level metrics, which we call "cognostics", have been created for us as part of the display. These provide us with meaningful ways to interact with what panels to view, as well as provide us with useful labels. You can modify which labels are shown underneath each panel by clicking the "labels" button on the left toolbar, or pressing "l" on your keyboard. The conditioning variables, "country" and "continent", are shown by default. Here we also add the mean life expectancy as a label. In the next lesson, we will show you how to create your own cognostics to use as labels and metrics for sorting and filtering.6. Filtering
We can use the panel-level cognostics to specify which panels we want to view through filtering operations. To open the filtering panel, click the "filter" button on the left sidebar or press "f" on your keyboard. For categorical cognostics, we can select values from a bar chart or through a text filter. For quantitative cognostics, we can select a filter range from a histogram. Here, we specify that we only want to look at countries in Africa, and for a specific range of mean life expectancy.7. Sorting
You can also specify the order in which you would like to view the panels. You can open the "sort" tool by clicking the "sort" button on the left toolbar or pressing "s" on your keyboard. Here, we remove the sorting variables of country and continent by clicking the "x" icons, and we sort on the mean life expectancy. The default sorting order is low to high, but if we click the blue up and down arrow icon it will toggle the sort order. Note that all of these controls are in place to help you find interesting spaces of your visualizations. This allows TrelliscopeJS to enable scalable faceting with potentially thousands of panels. In many cases, you will not need or be able to view all the panels, but the ability to potentially view any panel through the interactions is powerful.8. Let's practice!
Now it's your turn to interact with a Trelliscope display!Create Your Free Account
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