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?