timeline

A few years ago, I participated in my high school’s career day. I talked about my work at a blockchain start-up and preached the gospel of Bitcoin. It felt like a waste of everyone’s time because I don’t think the students understood what I was saying. How could they understand what it means to “improve API performance” when they don’t understand what an API is? I was certainly lost when I was in their shoes and attended my career day.

While working on a d3 timeline for another post, I came across a beautiful timeline library, d3-milestones, and knew that I wanted to use it. I’ve also wanted to play with WikiData for a long time, so I combined these two interests by grabbing data from Wikidata and visualizing it using d3-milestones. There’s another chart that I want to try out later in this post, so this first example will be straightforward: Stephen King novels by publication date.