Midterm Proposal: Andrea & Laura

Presentation

Bruce and Nick Midterm Idea – Tweetcatcha … Tweetcatcha

Wordpress won’t let us put html code into the html tag, it removes it, so we can’t put the presentation here, we have to link to it

Presentation

mid-term project ideas

by Yoon, Seung

download pdf here.

Times Newswire Project

This visualization is a tag cloud of the newswire sections. The frequency of the section determines the weight in the cloud.
Parsing the sections to get the frequency was the toughest, but more rewarding part of working on this project.
I had some trouble adding urls for the tag cloud to the project, to make it more interactive. It’s something that I would want to add
in another iteration of the project.

Tag Cloud

I think of this as a widget that could be in the corner of a webpage.

Design Patterns for Data Viz

Interesting library of design patterns for data visualization here:
http://www.patternbrowser.org/code/pattern/pattern.php?4,1,0,1,0,6.php

Based on Christian Behren’s Masters’s thesis — his pattern library is here:
http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/patterns.php

NewsWire Project

The idea behind the initial design was to create a fun, interactive visualization which would encourage people to look at the news/headlines without the current restrictions of “sections.” The headlines self-organize into their sections eventually, but initially they roam the screen freely, allowing people to see connections between stories that might not end up associated with each other in the paper or on the site.

Code, images, and application

Newswire API Visualization

OK I’ve spent WAY too much time on this since class and I don’t really have a lot more to show than some interaction, so I’m calling it quits for now and here is the final project. Getting used to the New York Times API’s was fun and not too difficult, however creating visualizations in C++ is proving to be a very big challenge. I need to accomplish this for my thesis though so as painful as this was I really learned a lot and built a lot of things that I can use in the future to (hopefull) speed up the process significantly

The blog won’t let me embed vimeo video, so here are the screenshots and you can check out the video here

reading responses

chapter 9:
In this chapter, the author said ‘good design’ has two key elements : simplicity of design and complexity of data. This is the question I have been asking to myself all the time. “What is good design?”  And I have my own definitions on good design, but it seems to change all the time. So, I am still looking for the answer. Tufte mentions aesthetics and technique in making good design. I think aesthetic is subjective. Some people say les is more, but there are other groups of people who say more is more. Visually attractive display or excellent technique could result good design, however I think good design should give something beyond just visibility. At the end, the author talks about scale, proportion, etc., which are useful tools to make better visual display. I could be wrong(most of times, I am wrong), but I don’t think there are principles or rules in design. There are successful designs that don’t follow those rules.

chapter 7:
One of the examples from this chapter, the shaped poem ‘easter wings’, was interesting, because I didn’t really think about meaning of words as data. I guess anything could be data. It is true that graphic elements multifunction when they are put into a map or graph. I think they create new layers when combined with each other.
When the author referred ‘contemporary’ design in this chapter, I stopped for a moment and looked through the pages to find out when this was written. The author mentioned that he started this book on 1975 and finished the first manuscript on 1982. I couldn’t imagine how contemporary design would look like at that time. What I find interesting is that most of theories Tufte talked about here still apply to today’s contemporary designs.

Reading Response 2

Both the Few and Tidwell readings answer the question of information display in a straight-forward methodical manner. Rules like these are one the things I was hoping to learn from this class, and both were an enjoyable read.

In general, most of what was prescribed made sense, and the questions the readings posed about data are important to keep in mind at all times. As with any set of rules, however, there is potential for over-restriction. Few dismisses the pie chart as a part-of-whole graph, claiming that the sizes of the different slices aren’t easily comparable, instead recommending the use of bar graphs. I disagree. First of all, a pie chart communicates the concept of part-of-whole wonderfully — the data literally adds up to make a whole! More importantly, pie chart slices are quite comparable to anyone who has read an analog clock. Amounts like a halves, thirds and quarters are instantly recognizable at a glance. Smaller proportions become less accurate, but serve to illustrate relative differences rather than allow accurate comparison. In a data set with many such small pieces that need to be compared a bar graph would me more appropriate, but the pie chart should not be dismissed as a tool outright.

Reading Response #2

Although much of these two readings seemed  to be rather ‘obvious’, I think they outlined very clearly what an information designer’s primary concerns should be – things that are very easy to lose sight of when trying to bend Processing or AS3 to your will in order to the make the most striking data viz.  I particularly appreciated the portion about ‘preattentive variables’ – once again, the ideas were not surprising or new, but it was helpful seeing them quantified in such striking examples.  Variations in color and size seem to be the most popular way to categorize data in most visualizations – the graphic was a reminder that other options exist as well.  This was  also true for the Patterns section in the Tidwell reading – I was reminded of underused visualization approaches (such as tree tables) and introduced to entirely new ones (data brushing).  The Communicating Numbers whitepaper in particular made me re-evaluate past projects of mine and understand more fully why they worked, didn’t work, or could have been better.  These readings may not have been particularly exciting or novel, but I’m sure I’ll be referring back to them regularly.