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.