Lance Stokes

Reviews:

Anne Harding

This was my favorite project of all the midterm presentation. As a fan of classic country, this was right in my wheelhouse, so I can be considered a target user for this visualization. First, it's obvious that you put a great deal of thought and effort into this project. The extent of your efforts to make the data conform is impressive, and I'll save your report a resource for the future. It's a wonderful, step-by-step walk thru of your entire process. I also really like the color choices you made. I think of country as an earthy subsection of the music spectrum, and the deep reds were appropriate. The interactivity is really very useful, and I enjoyed being able to use both the slider as well as the decade selection option. The website is very nice, and provides a nice enhancement for the visualization.

Perhaps the only addition I'd like to see on this visualization is the plotting of the actual towns that were mentioned in the songs, possibly linked via tooltip to the song or songs which mentioned that town. It would be fun to see if there are some songs that are mentioned more often as well as any clustering of these towns that might prompt correlation with the songwriters' home or somesuch. Plus, the locations of places like "Jackson" and "Reno" would be interesting to link with the songs that made them famous!

Overall, really a great, through job that serves as an example to the others in class!

Chakiera & Cheng

Chakiera and Cheng, I really enjoyed your presentation because Premier League football has long been a mystery to me, and your presentation helped me to get a better handle on it. You did a very nice job, especially given all the permutations of team matchup combinations that you had to deal with. I liked that you used the logo of each team in the visualization.

I also enjoyed seeing the creative iterations that you tried to optimize the project. I, too, would've tried a line graph first, but it really isn't best for this application. I liked the multiple approach of the bar graphs, and, as Dr. H mentioned, orienting them rotated 90 degrees (so that the wins/losses would be horizontal) would've helped tell the story better- losses to the left, wins to the right.

Personally, I liked the more colorful version with the bar color keyed to the team color. It is much easier to find a particular team as you scan the matchup array. And the colorfulness is in keeping with the spirited nature of the game.

As a neophyte, I would've enjoyed seeing a further distillation of your data- so what team had a higher winning percentage over the span of time? I'm not sure what metric you would use, but what team would be (arguably, of course!) the best team of the last ten years. That would make your visualization more valuable to hard core fans too, I'd think.

But overall- great job! I learned a lot from your project, and the visual aspects made it much more informative than mere statistics would have. Thanks!