A slightly updated version is up, with some of the changes discussed in my last post's comments.

Also, I'm thinking about having related sounds for a school be heard when you mouse over the school or something.

http://jackieweber.net/Flash.html

Colleges redone

Ok, it's pretty different and has a lot more info... tell me what you think. At this point, I think it needs some things taken out of it, but I'm not sure yet... I'd love some feedback! Thanks.

http://jackieweber.net/Flash.html

transparencies

does anyone know where i could get transparencies? Does the art store sell them?

Update!

So my idea totally changed from my last post. The color came out a bit dull, but this is what I'm thinking about.


The screen will show up like this, and you would have to hover you're mouse to view the next screen.

This shows the consumption of both male and female.

The viewer can click either the fast food (burgers) or non fast food (sandwich) to see the next screen.

Three different age group icons will appear. The first one is between 4-8 years, second is 9-13 years, and the third is 14-19 years.

When you click on the icon, it would begin to show the data and transform the icon slowly into an overweight one.

This is how it looks like once the information is loaded and you can click the next button to continue.


It will bring you back to the "take a bite" screen, but this time you can only click on the non fast food.






In the end, you can compare the differences between people that consumed fast food and those who didn't.

Overall, fast food makes you overweight! As shown on the last screen, one is fatter than the other! :D

New college flash

Ok, I've changed a number of things. First of all, there's only the map, no list version; second of all, gender and size are shown by dots, not pie charts. And pics aren't the first thing to show up.

Check it out here: http://jackieweber.net/Flash.html

I'm debating adding a few other interesting pieces of info; but this is a lot of info already, so we'll see.

Thanks for any feedback!

Interface Mockups

Still working on an interactive prototype, but here's some screen shots/story boards:


[1] - The user selects between viewing the whole database or just a sampling from a specific city, depending on their curiosity and if they're willing to put up with longer loading times.


[2] - The main interface loads and the viewer sees each posting is represented by a small symbol, in an ambient cloud. The user can uncheck the boxes at the left to hide entries from specific categories.


[3] - The user types in a word and presses enter. A small timer indicates the interface is loading.


[4] - The user's word emerges in the scene. Postings that contain the word flock towards it and highlight in color; those that don't fall to the bottom.


[5] - The user can also add another word by typing it into the text box and pressing enter. Again, postings flock towards words that they contain and highlight themselves. Postings hover in between if they contain both words, and highlight to an intermediate color. If they contain more of one word than the other, than their position reflects that bias.


[6] - If the user mouses over one of the words, the interface shows a small X that they can click on to remove it from the visualization.


[7] - If a user clicks on one of the posting icons, a more detailed view of the original post shows up.

-----------------------
Things I need help with:
-----------------------

- How can a user tag or highlight specific postings to keep track of?

- How are the positions of the user entered words determined? To more prevalent words come forward automatically? Does the user interact with or even specifically change them?

- My intention with adding color is to allow the postings to retain a reference to their user-defined groups. So if I add other views, say, geographic or demographic, the user can compare it back to this view. For example, if the user searches "yins" and then does a geographic view, they might find a concentration in the Pittsburgh.

More icons! I found a few more things I'd like to show. The pic has some of my new icons in it.

The top ones are the rainbow/anti-rainbow, just a few different ideas. Which one(s) do you like best?

I'm not going to describe the others, since I want to see if they make sense without a description :)

A much more interactive version is now up, if anyone wants to play around with it. Still a lot of 'look and feel' issues though...

http://jackieweber.net/Flash.html

I've started playing around with Flash. It's still pretty rough.

There's two views of the data - one is in a list form, and the other is in map form.
In list form, I think types of data should be able to be turned on and off via some control. On the map, I was thinking that data would pop up as you mouse over an image, along with the name of the school.

I'm not sure I'm going to show anything besides gender split, religious or not, size of school, and (for the map) location. Those seem to be the most interesting and relevant things.

The circles aren't exactly proportional, because the schools vary in size from 350 to 20,000, but hopefully they still give the user a decent feel for the relative sizes. I know this list page is really ugly, not sure what to do about it. The circles are kind of unwieldy.

Does the rainbow/anti-rainbow make sense? If you didn't know what this project was about, could you figure it out from that first page?

Right now, the only buttons that work are those in the upper left hand corner.
If you have Flash 9, you can check out what I have so far at : http://jackieweber.net/Flash.html


Thanks!

This is just one rough example of what my layout might look like, although it's still pending. I'm most likely going to have a digital piece rather than print.

So the first screen would have the over sized character there and his stomach would glow to indicate the viewer to click on it's stomach.



Once the stomach is clicked, it will zoom into the stomach and separate into different layers. Each layer would represent either, consumption, obesity, or health.



When you click on the top layer, the bottom layers would fade and a bar on top will appear. As seen on the right, there are two symbols indicating genders. To view the statistics, you would just have to drag one over to the left circle. I'm most likely going to have line or bar graph coming up from the platform.



I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this and I don't know exactly how the whole piece would come together once I include symbols, but this is just one general idea I thought of.

Sorry about this coming out so late this weekend.
So I had this idea of working with transparencies so that you could see how the hurricanes have progressed so it will look something like this.

Here is a closer look at Hurricane David from 1979. Please ignore the smaller circles. It was a Category 5, but by the time it hit the US it was only a Category 2. I'm not sure if the black splotches are clear. I have tracked the amount of days as well, which I hope you can get.

Here's a static example for what I'm thinking about doing. It has the top two colleges on both lists. Note that I haven't figured out how I'm going to indicate which college is on which list, but I'm not sure I'm going to - maybe I should leave some mystery up to user/reader?

Is it clear what things mean here? Especially the circles? The gender signs and colors should help, but also I wanted the size of the circles to represent campus population roughly. They're not exactly in proportion to one another, since they would have to be either some really really really tiny ones or some really really huge ones, but I think it gets the idea across.

Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Sketch

There was a bit of confusion with the location on the last post, so I'm just going to get rid of that part of information. I sketched a few from abstract -> literal based on what would be relevant to the effects of fast food products. Main ones would be how much of the product is consumed, which leads to health issues and obesity. Gender and age is also shown.

So I have been working on hurricane category, how to show number of deaths per storm and the amount of money spent. I was also sketching out ideas for showing location, but it became too abstract and unrecognizable. I ended up deciding to either use the name in words or the location by map. Also, I'm not sure I want to display the information digitally.

Craigslist update

So I've been successfully parsing craigslist with a little scraping program that saves entries into simple XML. I limited the scope to entries within the last 3 days, but I suspect it's still going to be too much data to work with. It's been running for a number of hours now and it's about a third of the way through the US with over 50MB of data saved. I really won't get a sense of how much is too much though, until I try parsing it back into a program and try to organize it in real time.

Anyway, I've also started playing around with icon ideas, mostly looking at gender (of both the poster or who they're looking for) and category (what their looking for). Some sketches below:

College symbols/icons/ideas

I sketched a few ideas, which hopefully you can see in the image to the left.

For distinguishing which list a college is on, I was thinking of just doing color-coding of whatever symbol/icon I choose.

While I don't have any animation or sound, I was thinking that I would introduce each icon as the user chooses it (or whatever) with some animation, something more than just having the item appear there.

I'll keep thinking about it this weekend, I'd like to come up with something a little more interesting than these...

sorry i have lost my page that has what we need to blog about this week, is it just showing what we are using to document the informaton, or the evolution of our symbols/icons documenting the information?

Continued~

I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to organize my fast food idea but I think I’m going to focus on the following information: calories, consumption, bacteria rates, and health rates.

Audience:

This would pertain to the general public because I believe it takes an effect to every age.

Goal:

To help people see what they are eating and possibly provide them a more healthy option.

Latch:

L: locations with the fast food expansion
T: the growth of the fast food chain and obesity due to fast food consumption
C: category restaurants based on similar numbers (calories/bacteria/consumption) or maybe show the different age groups that are effected the most

Temporal Map:

I would want to first show facts about people’s health rates before and after they consume the fast food. After that, I would want to show how the food is causing these results, such as showing the calories or bacteria that is presented.

In progress

I'm still working on scraping Craigslist (and hoping I don't crash any computers), but here's my ideas for organizing it:

I'd like to focus on the content of the posts, with respect to the characteristics of the poster, location and date. For now I think I'm going to focus on the personals section, since it contains the most personal characteristics. So here's the potential organizational systems, according to LATCH:

• Location: Geographic location by region or by city.


• Alphabetical: name of poster (as determined by the word following "my name is "; this would probably be pretty rare anyway though), name of city


• Temporal: Date, Day of the Week


• Categorical: Men-seeking-women, strictly-platonic, missed connections, etc. , gender of the poster.


• Hierarchical: poster's age, poster's weight/height, length of entry, number of reposts (this could be tricky to count though), number of times a particular word/phrase is used

And then I had a couple ideas for organizing the temporality of the information. Ideally I'd like the user to have some control over this order.

Word Use > Poster's Characteristics > Category > Date > Location

Date > Category > Poster's Characteristics > Word Use > Location

Since I'm working in an interactive medium, I'd like to make grouping a user-defined aspect. For example, the user might compare entries that contain the phrase "fun loving" to those that don't.

Hurricanes part 2

So with the hurricane information I've been looking at the number of deaths, location in America, and category of storm (which is based on wind speed).

L: The location of where the hurricane hits, where the deaths occured
A: Alphabetically by name of Hurricane, location names
T: Date, time the hurricane hit
C: Obviously category storm based on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale
H: hierarchy of the category storm, number of deaths, which location was hit first

Temporal Map:

• category storm (wind speed)
• location of storm
• length the storm is over this location
  
• number of deaths in the place (if I can find separate information from place to place)
  

There is also the amount of damage done and media coverage of the area. I have been looking at information from the past 35 years amount of time the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale has been used.

LATCH: college communities project

I've narrowed down my topic to examining the top schools on two of Princeton Reviews' lists:

Gay Community Accepted, and its opposite, Alternative Lifestyles not an Alternative.

So far there are some interesting patterns, but also some places where I expected to see patterns and didn't. The pieces of info I've chosen for now are some that show interesting patterns/lack of patterns.

Order of information:

• Geographical location- showing where each school is, the school's name, and which list it's on.
  
• Possily an alphabetical list of schools shown before geographical locations?
• Religious Affiliation (yes or no, if yes, what is it)
• Campus Environment (rural, town, city, metropolis)
• % of students who are female
• Quality of life rating (number, scale from 0 to 100)

I know it's more than three types of information, but it was hard enough not to put more types in there! Ideally, I want people to be able to turn on and off different pieces of information to see patterns.

I'm not sure how many schools to do for each. I'm thinking the top five from each list, which would mean ten total. I don't want to overwhelm users with info, but if I only do the top 3 or so, I may be missing some interesting patterns.

Stacie, please let me know if this wasn't the sort of thing you meant for this assignment, I wasn't quite sure... I have lots of ideas about how specifically this info should be visualized, but I didn't know if we should talk about that just yet.

My proposal: Digital self

Everybody is using Internet, but nobody really cares about what are we actually doing on the Internet. The internet covers everything we need in our daily life. We search for food, map, housing, jobs, friends, and even potential significant others. During the time we build a digital self on the Internet that we barely know about - the browser may knows about us better than ourselves because it stores our daily browsing histories. I found it particularly interesting to observe everybody's daily browsing history changing over time, that adds up a image of a digital being - your digital self on the Internet, mirroring your inner identity and value.

I want to build a dynamic data information visualization piece, through which you could compare your real self and your digital self, in order to know better about yourself.

Current Problem:
No visualizations for personally browsing history

Audience:
Every Internet Users

Context:
Everyday.

Fast Food Restaurants

Hello,

When I first got this assignment, I wasn't exactly sure what direction I wanted to head towards to, but I figured I'll do something food related. I want to actually focus on fast food restaurants and how it affects our daily lives. As you all know, fast food is basically something that you can get quicker and cheaper than your average restaurant. Power house names, such as McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Dominos, expanded within different countries and sometimes make their own twist on what they serve based on their culture. That’s one possible information I would like to look into, because I find it interesting when a Burger King from Asia serves different kinds of food than in the United States.

Another thing that I have in mind is the expansion rate of the fast food restaurants. In the past, I’ve been told that a McDonalds is literally on every block of NYC, which shows that the fast food franchise is expanding greatly. So that is something I would focus on as well, which is the number of fast food restaurants being established yearly. Also, I would also look into how it affects the customers that consume the product. An example would be the movie Super Size Me, which shows how fast food can make someone from being healthy into a total mess. Because of this, I would want to compare how the general population health and weight changed as the fast food franchise slowly expanded drastically. Other content I have in mind are:

- calories within the food being served in different fast food franchises
- how much is consumed by the general public
- age group it takes in affect the most

Overall, I believe my main focus is how fast food takes affect in the general public. I believe this is important because people are concerned about what they are eating. I actually viewed a couple of nutrient facts for a few of the franchises online and I feel like there should be something more that could make it visually clear.

Project Definition

Craigslist, the internet classified community founded by Craig Newmark, is well known as an internet anomaly. Despite being an ad-free, and almost entirely free use service run by only 25 employees, it provides a medium for local listings that rival major internet corporations for job postings, real estate, personal ads, and private sales. The Craigslist database is organized regionally to promote local exchange, and broken down hierarchically into subjects to facilitate relevance of postings. The posts are searchable, filterable, and collectively moderated though flagging. In all, the collection is optimized for seeking and locating a specific query.

While Craigslist is established as a useful tool in providing classified services, it has also inadvertently developed a following for being a rich catalogue of transient human pursuit. Each posting is loosely formatted and therefore gives a glimpse at the personality behind the item or service being sought or requested. Though it's efficient as a localized search tool, Craigslist is difficult to navigate in its capacity as a social scrapbook. With the exception of its relatively small collection of "Best of Craigslist", the site is effectively impossible to browse across multiple locations or throughout multiple categories. To more easily understand and appreciate the human elements contained in Craigslist, it's data should be represented in a form that allows users to understand subjective trends and browse entries out of curiosity rather than necessity.

This proposed alternate representation of Craigslist will most benefit members of Gen-X and Gen-Y who contradict the notion of the internet as an information superhighway, but instead choose to embrace the the chaos in it's messy collection of fascinating tidbits. These users are mall rats and window-shoppers of the web. An alternate representation of Craigslist enables these users immerse themselves among the people represented by the posts, to feel connected and be inspired.

Since Craiglist itself exists in cyberspace, it would both logical and convenient for an alternate representation to be posted online, in order to be equally accessible. The current representation of Craigslist is infamously text-based, meaning the only graphical information is the images associated with individual postings. This is useful for approaching Craigslist in a left-brain sense, for filtering and seeking information. To perceive the network catalogued human pursuit, Craiglist should be abstracted, as to perceive large amounts of data simultaneously and dynamically. In addition to existing organizations of data that show location, category, date, and—where appropriate—age, time-span, cost and/or compensation, the alternate representation could show use of descriptive vocabulary, emphasis of self (e.g. use of "I", "Me", "Myself" versus, "You", "Them", etc.), and tone (use of all-capitalization, exclamation marks, profanity, etc.).

Ideally, this information representation could be self-updated by sharing the Craiglist database, or automatically scrapping from the website. Otherwise the information could be periodically scrapped and re-posted independent of the database's own updates. Since the alternate representation would be digital, it could be easily be manipulated to adapt to the changing data source.

Project Definition

Hurricanes one of the most dangerous “natural disasters” in the world. They often include flooding, thunderstorms, and tornadoes. People often don’t know how dangerous these storms can be; deasth is also a common factor in these storms. It isn’t always an easy thing to know how dangerous a storm will be after all it’s only rain and fast wind blowing. People should be able to know how dangerous it is outside, so that they are better able to protect themselves. Is it even safe to stay home or should they evacuate. The news can tell the information, but after awhile it stops making sense and just being statistics.

With an availability to the category storm and the forecasted path, people can predict what might happen and prepare for it. Are there any conections between what category the storm is and how much wind or rain damage there will be. Are there any connections to the the damage done from rain or wind to the catergory storm? Government Officials may with this information also be able topredict how much money thay are going to have to spend repairing the damage. Especially considering the increase in the amount of money that the United States has spent in the past twenty years.

Information I am planning to look into
Category of storm related to amount of rain
Damage from wind
Damage from flooding
Number of tornadoes in a particular storm
When in the season a storm occurs
The duration of the storm
The amount of deaths in a storm
The amount of media coverage for each storm during and after

With this information people in affected areas of the United States may be able to better prepare themselves for what is to come. They can compare how bad the storm is to when in the storm season it occurs, what category it is before it hits land, and what type of damage they should be prepared for before the storm really hits. Is there time to escape?

more ideas

So I had two other ideas rattling around in my head that might actually be useful to other people.

1. Catorgizing the plants in the surrounding area. I know that Pittsburgh has many bikers, hikers, and campers, people who like the outdoors. In any case it might be good to have a way to tell the poisonous plants from the safe plants and to know what plants can do what for you, Safe to eat etc.

2. Information on hurricanes how they are tracked, which hurricanes do the most damage ones with faster wind or more rain, how much money it takes to rebuild after such an occurrence, what the media coverage is like.

A few directions

I've been mulling over topics and I've managed to pair down my brainstorming into a few ideas:

1. I'm interested in working with a large volume of highly organized data. I've poked around on the CIA World Factbook and I like that the raw data is very dry and concrete. I did read the dicussion on Team 5's Blog, so I have some concerns that the data might become dull after a several weeks, but I also think the variety of potential comparisons could keep it interesting.

2. I'm interested in working with data that shows human subjectivity. I've done some small projects in the past with data from Craigslist and, like the CIA Factbook, I like that there's a large volume of easily scrape-able data. Unlike the Factbook though, Craigslist data is highly driven by personal opinions and vernacular which could be much more interesting but, as a tradeoff, it's less organized and harder to parse into organized comparisons.

3. I'm interested in working with data outside the typical scheme of contemporary information visualizations: survey data, web trends, demographics, politics, etc. I came across two interesting databases on dinosaurs by The National History Museum and The Arts and Letters Corporation. Between them there's a nice collection of straightforward data about physical characteristics, diet, time span and fossil locations. I think it could be interesting to relate the fossil location data to the relative location of the continents at the time of their existence (e.g. Pangea, Laurasia, etc).

So, any feedback on which idea would be stronger, more interesting, or more effective in a portfolio would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Rough Ideas

So I have three ideas.

One deals with announcements in the newspaper: engagements, weddings, births, and deaths. I thought it might be interesting to compare these with events in the local area, the country, and internationally. See if the amount of announcements or the type of announcement differs depending on what is going on in the world. If it is a particularly tough time such as a 9/11 were there more obituaries or a surge of baby announcements, were people trying to show the positive or the negative.

Another idea also has to do with the obituaries. How did the people die, how many were they survived by, and at what age did they die, do any of these things have a push towards why the obituary was written? Very morbid, but it was actually the first thing that popped into my head, so I had to see what people thought.

The third idea also has to do with newspapers specifically the first section/page. I wanted to see if there was any connections between the headline and the surrounding article titles. Does this seem too simple?

Project Definition

When a high school student decides which college they want to attend, there are a number of variables they must take into consideration. The prioritization of the variables may differ between students - one may value academic standing more than cost, or vice versa - but most students are concerned about similar things. Currently, this information is generally shown as a table of numbers. There are sites where a student can see tables from different colleges side-by-side, but again, these are just numbers.

A table of numbers does not provide an intuitive way to understand or compare schools. But deciding which college to attend is an important one for many individuals. In addition to college-bound high school students, their teachers, college counselors, and parents are often involved in this decision. This indicates that a large group of individuals would be interested in a better representation of important college information.

Some variables that I may consider in my project include:
Financial issues (cost of tuition, average amount of financial aid/loans)
Student to teacher ratios
Male to female ratios (among students and among professors)
Racial diversity
Four year success rate
Geographic location
Size of the school (number of students)
Living accommodations
Campus safety
Rank of school (on US News and World Report's listings)
etc

Since there are such a large number of variables, and since the relative importance differs between individuals, an ability to interact with the data representation would be helpful. Users could choose which colleges to compare, and which variables to represent. This suggests a digital medium which allows for interaction. Animation may also help, showing the user one variable for multiple schools at a time before moving on to another variable.


P.S. I am out of town this weekend, so I may not be able to respond to comments/make comments until Monday. Sorry.

Possible (rough) idea

One thought I had was to find some way to visually compare colleges/universities. There's a lot of data out there, but it's all just lists of numbers, as far as I can tell. There are sites to help you compare (http://www.collegeview.com/collegesearch/CompareSchools.jsp, http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/compare_schools.jsp), but it just shows the numbers side by side. Shouldn't there be some better way of showing this data?

Is there already something like this out there that any of you know of? I couldn't find anything, but I just came up with the idea (well, my mom and I brainstormed it up!).

I don't really have a lot of specifics yet, but there are so many variables that people want to take into account when they're thinking about school. There must be better ways to represent them than with just numbers. Geographical location is an obvious one to represent via maps...

Let me know what you think. Is it interesting to enough people? Something that hasn't been well-visualized? etc

~Jackie

Welcome!

Based on what we discussed in class this evening, what are you proposing to use as content for the project? What problem(s) have you identified and why is the topic important? To whom is it important and in what context? What opportunities have you identified?