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.