About WNC Viz
What is WNC Viz?
WNC Viz is a boutique software and data visualization company specializing in custom built, data visualization and animation in web pages. While based in Western North Carolina, WNC Viz works with people around the world.
Who is WNC Viz
WNC Viz is owned and operated by Mark McClure, also a Professor of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina - Asheville. In addition to teaching mathematics at UNCA, Mark also teaches statistics and a little computer science.
More about Mark
A member of Observable's first Ambassador cohort, Mark McClure has been building interactive visualizations on the web for years. Mark built his first web page in 1993 while a graduate student in Mathematics at the Ohio State University. After completing his Ph.D. in 1994, Mark held visiting positions at Washington & Lee University and St. Olaf College before settling at the University of North Carolina Asheville in 1997. He also taught at Cornell University during at 2003-4 sabbatical year.
During his 30 years of teaching, Mark has always used and developed state of the art tools for technical communication - starting with the use of Mathematica for teaching Calculus in 1989. Mark's use of Mathematica grew over the years to the point where he published a regular column in the journal Mathematica in Education & Research. His mathematical visualizations have been featured on the covers of The Mathematica Journal, The Mathematical Intelligencer, and Math Horizons as well as in Computers & Graphics and Scientific American.
Mark's consulting work began in 2010 when he spent three years helping Wolfram Research add mathematical content to Wolfram Alpha. After transitioning to more open tools, Mark spent another three years developing mathematical content for elementary school teacher's with the Schoen Research Group. After further refinement to his use of open tools to create visualizations for his own teaching, Mark formed WNC Viz in 2020 to formalize his consulting work.
Mark uses a variety of tools to develop his visualizations. Depending on the project, those tools might include.
- Python for data aquisition and analysis,
- D3 for interactive visualization within a webpage,
- and Svelte for building high quality, final projects.
In addtion, Mark is highly active in the Observable community. You can find several hundred more of his visualizations on his account there.
Expertise
WNC Viz can handle all aspects of moving raw data to polished visualization - be it a map, chart, or design of almost any specification. Specialties include:
- Curating and cleaning data: Ideally, the client has or knows where to get the data they would like to visualize. Often, though, I can help with that process as I have extensive experience with open data sources and Python based software for manipulating data.
- Analysing data: A tremendously important question, of course, is - what conclusions can we draw from data? With extensive experience in statistical theory, practice, and software I can perform sound analysis and draw genuine conclusions.
- Visualizing data: Data visualization is the art of clearly illustrating the relationships inherent in data. I am an expert in using D3 (the most powerful Javascript data visualization library available) and related tools to bring those relationships to life.
- Maps: Geographic data is specialized and important enough to warrant it's own topic. I have extensive experience taking raw shapefile data, mixing in tabular data (representing demographic or other data), and simplifying it all to a form suitable for representation on the web.
- Web development: While web development is not my focus, I can help ensure your visualization fits nicely in your web space. In addition, I can add a little spice to webpages with custom animations.
- Educational content: With years of experience as a teacher of mathematics, I've built hundreds of interactive tools to illustrate concepts geometrically. I can easily bundle these tools with well-written prose and formulae.
Contact
To contact WNC Viz to work on your data or visualization project, just email info@wncviz.com.