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 and Advizor tools from Visual Insights, and the Eureka tool from Inxight. 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 three 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. Work with some different data sets
Each tool includes a few sample data sets, but often it's best to learn with something new. We have supplied two data sets below that you should load into all the different tools and work with. One is data about a variety of foods and the other is data about a hypothetical university course. Load these two data sets into each of the visualization tools that we're examining. How do the different tools work with this information? Are you able to uncover any interesting attributes of the data? How might a person use the tools to analyze the information? Consider questions such as "What are the best foods with respect to..?" "Are there any correlations between TAs and ...?" Put yourself in the shoes of a data analyst, and consider questions that person would confront.

3. 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 a nice report. What kinds of analysis questions did you come up with? Were the tools able to help answer those questions? Document any interesting findings you made on the data. (We'll try to reward the person with the most unique one!)

Please prepare your write-up in HTML format so that we can put it on our web site. Additionally, please bring two hardcopies to class on the day that it is due.

Food (comma separated text)
Food (Excel)
Course (comma separated text)
Course (Excel)

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Christopher Ahlberg of Spotfire, Steve Eick of Visual Insights, and Ramana Rao of Inxight for assisting us with software acquisition for this assignment.