Mark McClure

@mark31459
8 Followers
11 Following
16 Posts
Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and progressive data visualizer.

NC Legislative Election Results:

Did you know that there were more votes cast for Democrats than Republicans in the recent state legislative elections, yet the republicans nearly have a super majorities in both houses?

You can read and see more about this in my latest data based blog post:

https://blog.wncviz.com/posts/politics/NCElectionResults2024/

You can also comment on that post here!

NC Legislative Election Results 2024

Interactive visualization of the results of the legislative district elections in North Carolina from the Fall of 2024.

When I started my data based blog with Observable Framework a couple of weeks ago, my intention was to focus on issues in politics and higher education. As a resident of Asheville, North Carolina, though, I've discovered a sudden, strong interest in hurricanes since Hurricane Helene hit. So my second blog post explores the growing impact of climate change on my region:
https://blog.wncviz.com/posts/Misc/hurricanes/

@observablehq

You can comment on the post here.

Hurricanes in Asheville

Data based exploration of the frequency of hurricanes that've impacted Asheville, together with some political commentary

@severo I am evidently no expert on posting links into Mastodon, just yet.🤔

@severo I've got more than hints! I've got two blogs running right now, literally set up in the last couple of weeks:

Mark on Framework uses GitHub Discussions:

https://mcmcclur.observablehq.cloud/mark-on-framework/

Also, the [code is on Github](https://github.com/mcmcclur/MarkOnFramework)

Then, there's this WNCViz Blog for my business, which uses Mastodon for commenting:

https://blog.wncviz.com/

Mark on Framework

Mark's thoughts on Observable Framework, including cool techniques.

@severo This looks great - thanks for sharing!

I've just started trying to blog with Framework, too, and several folks have asked about how to do it on the forum and on GitHub. One feature you might consider adding is commenting. You can add comments using Mastodon, GitHub, and Discourse!

New blog post: Create the dashboard for a Discourse forum

I wanted to learn about the new integration between Observable and GitHub to automatically deploy a data app.

As the Discourse API is super easy to work with, I decided to create an app with Observable Framework to understand key metrics of the Observable forum:
- 7 years
- 50 monthly active users
- 90% of the questions get replies

Discover how I build the app in the post:

https://blog.rednegra.net/2024/09/26/create-a-discourse-dashboard

Create a Discourse Dashboard | Sylvain Lesage's Blog

I was ★★ by this very simple and yet powerful interaction pattern that the NYT made on their election polls page; I knew I had to reproduce it. Lots of small details to figure out… now it's available as a reusable options transform for Observable Plot.
https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-pointer-driven-marks
Plot interaction: pointer-driven marks

The New York Times’ chart showing hundreds of election polls for the 2024 presidential election has this great interaction pattern, where an annotation describes the most recent data points. But as soon as the viewer starts pointing over the chart, they take control and the annotations very naturally follow the mouse. Here it is, as a video: Showing a default annotation when the user is not pointing is such an immediate and useful pattern that I want to replicate it with Observable Plot. As always, there ar

Observable

So far, I use Mastodon mainly as a place to store comments on my blog. This blog post describes roughly how that works and why I chose to use Mastodon:

https://blog.wncviz.com/MastodonComments.html

Mastodon Comments | WNCViz Blog

I wrote a blog post on using RevealJS within an Observable Framework project. You can comment on that post here and view the post on the Observable Cloud:

https://mcmcclur.observablehq.cloud/mark-on-framework/posts/RevealJS/

@observablehq

RevealJS in Framework

A description of how to use RevealJS within an Observable Notebook.

I've written a blog post on mathematical typesetting within Observable Framework. You can comment on that post here and view the post on the Observable Cloud:

https://mcmcclur.observablehq.cloud/mark-on-framework/posts/MathematicalTypesetting/

@observablehq

Mathematical Typesetting

Various ways to typeset mathematics within an Observable Framework project.