In this project, you will develop a data visualization that tells a story about a data set of your choice. Whereas the Bytes were designed to teach you about the plumbing necessary to visualize data, the goal of this project is to explore the art of visual portraiture. You may work in groups on this project.
- Develop experience with narrative construction in the context of data visualization. Your final product will be judged based on the clarity of the narrative it represents.
- Develop experience with selecting data that can effectively tell the story you wish to tell. Your final product will be judged based on the strength and appropriateness of the data you select. You may want to show dynamic information (such as showing the user information about themselves collected from twitter or facebook.com). Alternatively, you may want to use static data such as the many interesting sets on Google Fusion Tables. Here are some additional sources of interesting static data sets that could be uploaded to Google Fusion Tables.
- Develop experience with using visualization techniques to both support a narrative and accurately represent the data. Your final product will be judged based on the strength, appropriateness, and truthfulness of the visualizations you select. You may use your choice of visualization tools. Regardless of what tool you use, you may also want to explore the blog infosthetics.com for creative ideas for your visualization. The specific data and visualization type you choose will depend on the data set and the story you are trying to tell.
- Develop experience with showing your visualization to a user to get feedback on it. You will be judged on the quality of the user feedback you present, and the impact it had on your project.
You will hand in a web page that addresses all 4 points above. That is, it should tell a story (either using text or video) about a visualization (which should be available on the web page). In addition, it should document the sources and approach. Finally it should document what you showed users, what you learned, and how that impacted your final results. You will hand in a link to this web page (which can be hosted on Google Appspot). In addition, you will prepare a poster for presenting in class (and you can bring your laptop for a live demo).
BE SURE to put your names on your poster. In addition, attendance is required for the poster presentation session.
Extra credit available at the discretion of the grader if you develop a complex custom visualization, support a high degree of interactivity, integrate complex data together from multiple sources, or develop a narrative that is especially deep and multifaceted.