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.

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Things I need help with:
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- 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.