This assignment will familiarize you the panning/zooming information visualization model embodied by the Pad++ and Jazz systems. The goal of the assignment is to have you utilize and build an information display in this paradigm, thereby assisting you to better understand its capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

The assignment has three parts:

1. Gain familiarity
Log on and run the HiNote demonstration application that comes with the Jazz system. Walk through the tutorial and learn about the application, its interfaces and its capabilities.

2. Design an information space on some particular topic.
Utilize the HiNote application to design an information space or module that will help someone learn about a particular topic. Your topic an be an area of interest to you such as a hobby, an event in history, or it can be a topic in an academic area of interest to you such as computer graphics or human-computer interaction. Your information space should include both text and graphical images, but it can be organized in any way that you see fit. Try to make it include a dense body of information/data. Experiment with the zooming paradigm. What does it allow you to do that you would not be able to otherwise? How would the user/viewer of your space navigate around and learn from it?

3. Write a report on your experiences
Document all your activities throughout the assignment. Explain briefly what your information space is about (it should probably be somewhat self-explantory). Discuss what it was like working with the jazz tool. What was easy and what was challenging? What did you like and dislike? Were there caapabilities that you would like to have added to the system? Try not to focus on the this particular UI or piece of software. Focus more on the spirit of the paradigm. Turn in two copies of your hardcopy report (from HTML). We also will place your report and jazz file(s) on-line. Details to come later.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Ben Bederson at the University of Maryland for assisting with Jazz. To download the package onto your own machine, go to http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/ and go to the download page. You will also need the Java runtime environment (at least) or jdk 1.3 (better).