tcplot(🎨💻🎤)
tcplot() is a Twin Cities community for data visualization practitioners, enthusiasts, and storytellers. Whether you are a D3 wizard, a Tableau pro, a ggplot2 devotee, or someone who appreciates a well-crafted chart, you've found your people.
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Our mission is to elevate the data literacy and design standards of the MSP area through three core pillars:
- ▸ Talks: Hear from local experts and industry leaders on the "why" and "how" of great visualization.
- ▸ Workshops: Roll up your sleeves for hands-on sessions where we master new tools, libraries, and design principles.
- ▸ Build-a-thons: Join collaborative coworking where we take datasets and turn them into impactful, interactive, or artistic visual stories.
Next Event: Claude Code for Data Visualization — May 23rd
AI-assisted coding is changing how visualization practitioners prototype, iterate, and ship. In this hands-on workshop, we'll get you up and running with Claude Code — Anthropic's agentic coding tool — and put it to work on real dataviz problems. No prior experience with AI coding tools required.
Whether you're deep in D3, grinding through ggplot2, or somewhere in between, you'll leave with a working setup and a concrete sense of where Claude Code fits (and doesn't fit) in a practitioner's workflow.
Location & Logistics
- ▸ When: Saturday, May 23 · 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM CDT
- ▸ Where: The Coffee Shop NE, 2852 Johnson St NE, Minneapolis, MN
- ▸ Make sure to bring your laptop and charger.
Past Event: An API Build-a-thon on April 4th
Are you ready to build a digital masterpiece? Whether you want to curate a virtual gallery using The Met, track near-earth objects with NASA, or dive into the digital archives of the Natural History Museum, this is your playground.
There's no set prompt—only a treasure trove of world-class APIs and a room full of creative minds. You pick the data, you pick the stack, and create your own adventure.
The Mission
You have one day to build a project using at least one culture, science, or other cool API. We'll provide a curated list of fun APIs to get your gears turning, but the final destination is up to you.
Potential Quests
- ▸ The Curator: Build a "Daily Masterpiece" bot using The Metropolitan Museum of Art API.
- ▸ The Astronaut: Create a live asteroid tracker or a Mars Rover gallery using NASA Open APIs.
- ▸ The Explorer: Map out biodiversity hotspots using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
- ▸ The Historian: Connect the dots of the past using the Smithsonian or Library of Congress data.
More Cool APIs
Science & Nature
- ▸ NASA APIs — APOD, Mars rovers, asteroids
- ▸ GBIF — Global biodiversity data
- ▸ OpenWeatherMap — Weather data
- ▸ USGS Earthquake API — Real-time quake data
Health & Public Data
- ▸ WHO GHO API — Global health data
- ▸ CDC WONDER — Public health datasets
- ▸ OpenFDA — Drug events, recalls, labeling
Space & Astronomy
- ▸ SpaceX API — Launches, rockets, capsules
- ▸ Open Notify — ISS location, astronauts in space
Culture & Fun
- ▸ Rijksmuseum API — Art collection data
- ▸ Open Library API — Book metadata
- ▸ PokeAPI — Pokemon data
- ▸ TMDB — Film and TV data
Geospatial & Environment
- ▸ OpenStreetMap — Map & geographic data
- ▸ Global Forest Watch — Deforestation data
- ▸ NOAA Climate Data — Historical weather records
Economics & Society
- ▸ World Bank API — Development indicators
- ▸ Census Bureau API — US demographic data
- ▸ FRED — Economic time series data
Location & Logistics
- ▸ Make sure to bring your laptop and charger.
- ▸ Where: The Coffee Shop NE, 2852 Johnson St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418
- ▸ When: 12PM on April 4th
Why join? Because the world's most interesting data is sitting behind an API key, waiting for someone to do something awesome with it. Why not you?
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