Visualization

By Sandra Schloen, June 2020

Visualization Wizard (VizWiz)

OCHRE's new Visualization Wizard, the VizWiz, introduced in June 2020, guides a user through the process of producing charts, graphs, and other visualizations using project data.

Explore some case studies below. Contact us if you wish to include your project's visualizations in our gallery of samples.

To produce a visualization, begin by creating an OCHRE Set in the usual way. That is, design and perform a Query that selects the items of interest then save the query results as a Set. View the Set and click the Chart View option represented by the button with the bar chart icon. The VizWiz will appear in the Set's View pane, and the data available to the visualizations will be limited to the data defined by the Set.

Alternatively, the Chart View feature is also available as a pop-up window from the quick-view toolbar on the Query Results pane. Accessed from there, the data available to the visualizations will be limited to the data defined by the query results.

Choose the desired Type of visualization and the VizWiz will guide you through the necessary steps to produce it.

Technical Notes

OCHRE's charting feature is supported by JavaFX. Note, too, that OCHRE is currently using only default styling for its charts. There is extensive JavaFX support for customizing the style of the charts using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). OCHRE welcomes contributions of style sheets for this purpose and we hope to make a library of these available for our users. Anyone who contributes will be appropriately credited and appreciated! Please contact us for details.

OCHRE's network graphs are built using the powerful yFIles for Java library that provides "algorithms and components enabling the analysis, visualization, and the automatic layout of graphs, diagrams, and networks." The Harris matrix feature is a special-purpose "graph" built using yFiles. We have only begun to scratch the surface of possibilities provided by this toolkit.

OCHRE's support for advanced statistics, based on the popular statistics package R, is provided in collaboration with the Research Computing Center (RCC) at the University of Chicago which maintains an R server for this purpose. This component is still under development. If your project could benefit from this feature, and if you would like to be a beta-tester, please let us know.

ALL these features are works-in-progress so some options will be limited. This article will be updated as the feature set grows.

Overview

Overview of wizard options

For visualization options, from the VizWiz choose:

Type of Visualization: Chart, Harris Matrix, Network Graph, Statistics

  • Keep in mind that the nature of the items in the set may fit one of these types better than another.
  • For example, you will not produce a meaningful network graph from counts of pottery. You will not produce a meaningful bar chart from social network nodes.

Content (top tab)

  • This tab provides a summary of items in the set on the Items tab.
  • Subsumed on this tab also is the Format tab, see following.

Format (left tab)

  • This tab provides customization options, depending on the type of Visualization selected.