A number of new breakthroughs since the last post. Have deployed my Circle class as an array of circles, which is perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome to realize the complete visualization. I also diverted my attention briefly to create another object class (which, incidentally, went VERY smoothly) to create bullet graph as per Stephen Few. An exciting extension of this idea came at Stephen's workshop, when he mentioned that (1) no one commercial vendor had yet implemented a bullet graph and (2) he had posted a complete bullet graph specification on his website. I see this as an opportunity to extend my bullet graph object class to fully realize Stephen's specification and to share it with the Processing community.
But back to the Texas vis project...
I've learned some important lessons about the XlsReader library and the nature of xls spreadsheets. It took my QUITE some time to determine that CALCULATED VALUES in an excel spreadsheet are not recognized as ANY of the data primitive types (at least int, float, or string). While my code was running, I was getting a continuous stream of error messages indicating a type mismatch. I ultimately determined that it was the result of calculated results in the spreadsheet. When I replaced them with "hard-coded" values, the problem was resolved.
Next steps will be to read the dropout rate from the xls and represent it correctly. THEN, read a series of values over the course of years and move through them on mouseclicks.
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