This assignment will familiarize you with a number of commercial tools for doing information visualization and data analysis. You will be working with the Spotfire Pro tool from Spotfire, the SeeIt tool from Visible Decisions, and the Advizor tool from Visual Insights. The goal of the assignment is to have you learn the capabilities provided by these types of tools, learn the basic visualization methods that they provide, and assess their utility in analyzing information repositories.

The assignment has four parts:

1. Gain familiarity
Log on to a Microsoft NT machine and start up each of the different tools that we'll be using. Each one has a tutorial that you can try out with a sample data set. Work your way through the tutorial and become familiar with the system, its interface and its capabilities.

2. Find or make a new data set
Each tool includes a few sample data sets, but often it's best to learn with something new. Use appropriate resources (the Web, books, newspapers, magazines, etc.) to find some new data set that will be interesting to analyze in the different tools. You might find one on-line, or you might have to type in the data yourself, but come up with something that is not already available and presented in an existing visualization tool. (Try to come up with something from an area of interest to you such as a hobby or study interest.) The data set should be large enough to make a compelling case why it would be necessary to use one of these tools to analyze it. Mail this data set to Quan (quantt@cc) and she will save it in a common directory here.

3. Load the new data set
Load this new data set into each of the visualization tools that we'll be examining. How do the different tools work with this information? Are you able to uncover any interesting attributes of the data? How might an person use the tools to analyze the information?

4. Write a report on your experiences
Document all your activities throughout the assignment. First and foremost, critique the different visualization tools. What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do their visualization capabilities differ? What about their user interfaces? Essentially, you should conduct a heuristic evaluation of the different tools and report your findings in about 3-5 pages of text. In addition, briefly describe the data set that you identified and include a screen dump or two from the visualization tools working on your data set. Describe how the different tools were able to assist analysis of the data. You can prepare an electronic version of your paper to be turned in, but please also do submit a hardcopy on the due date.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Christopher Ahlberg of Spotfire, Bill Wright of Visible Decisions, and Steve Eick of Visual Insights for assisting with our getting this software to use this term.