As a scientist, how to dive into JavaScript for data visualization? An example with a particle stream to illustrate the movement of glaciers.
The web is an effective way to communicate complex spatial scientific data and make them more accessible to more people. As an example, web maps with particle streams are used to communicate efficiently wind or ocean current data. As glaciers are flowing just like wind or water, we used this « particle » approach to develop a map of Antarctica showing glacier movement. But, as scientists, JavaScript is not our day today dev language. We present our strategy to map moving ice particles over the web using scientific data. Open codes and tools helped us a lot to move from scientific to web worlds. The prototype was implemented in the observableHQ collaborative development environment, reducing the learning curve and facilitating transfer from similar applications. The notebook environment is well suited to work in an iterative process and obtain a readable code to make it reproducible by other scientists. Even for the non-common Antarctica coordinate reference system, the D3.js library was the only one used to map data. Finally, the animated map was transferred to a web application for scientific communication purposes.