Yiyang Shi

Chana

I really admire the fact that Chana went beyond visualization and actually used visualization as a tool to dig deep into a topic that she is interested in. I noticed that she made a lot of changes since her presentation and I think these changes improved the visualization a lot. For the small multiples, she changed number of colors used from two to one. Since number of resettlement and percent of population are continuous data, continuous one color scale makes more sense than two contrasting colors. For the refugee by country visualization, I like the fact that she completely changed the map presentation to size presentation. Although such change lost the spatial element, it keeps the important information, which is to show the countries that US has taken the most refugees from.

There are two places that I think could potentially be improved. For the refugee by country visualization, I would recommend using ranked bar charts than circles. In general, people are better at height comparison than size comparison. So ranked bars could better show the difference in numbers. If we order the bars by the height, we can still show the ranks. Also, bar charts would allow the names of those countries with small numbers to show up. Currently, they are taking spaces on the graph but cannot be identified easily. For the total refugee v.s. pending applications scatterplot, I would recommend taking China out of the graph and change the scale of the y-axis. We can list China individually on the page. Then, the countries will not cluster so closely to the origin.

Jessica & Miranda

I think Jessica and Miranda’s project is very successful. They have a clear CUT-DDV laid out at the very beginning of the visualization, which helps them limit the scope of the work. Their color choice is coherent throughout all the visualization and, as they mentioned during the presentation, relevant to their topic. For the first two graphs, I like the fact that they created a separate map only to show publications outside of the US. I think this is a smart approach when one large number can significantly impact the visualization. For the visualization on content comparison, I like the fact that they included both bar charts and line graphs on the same graph to show the difference. The lines display changes over time while the bar charts allow the users to dig into the difference for every year. Overall, I think Jessica and Miranda showed a very complete picture on Holocaust literature through analysis and visualization on publication location, time, literature content, and author attributes.

There are two areas that I think could potentially be improved. One is to change continuous color scale to interval color scale on the publication map without United States. I noticed that the number of records ranges from 1 to 9. By using continuous color scale, countries with one number difference will be assigned with a different color. If we only allow three colors, 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, then there could be a better contrast shown on the map. For the time series comparison visualizations, I would prefer to lay out the bar charts by year horizontally so that users can not only compare the categories within a year but compare them across years. I understand that the line graphs already did the job. Then, maybe it is easier just to print out the number on the graph.

- I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Yiyang Shi -