Designing Information Visualizations

Problem
What news should you read? Which stocks should you invest in? Which car should you buy? People face hundreds of questions like this every day. These are the types of questions to which added knowledge or information can provide a great help. But at the same time, we are in an information glut. How does a person take a massive amount of information and make a decision based on that data?

One way that information can be coalesced, filtered and structured better is through the use of visualizations. You must have heard the expression that, "A picture is worth a thousand words." This is the guiding principle behind the field of Information Visualization.

Information visualization differs from data visualization in that data visualization is usually concerned with visualizing observations and scientific quantities in domains such as the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Information visualization refers to visualizing more structured data. The two fields do have much in common, however.

The purpose of this project is for you to learn more about the field of information visualization, and to be a little creative and design a visualization of your own. First, read the articles below to learn about existing research in this field. Then choose one of the topics below, and design an information visualization for it. You only need to design this visualization on paper but you should be artistic and detailed. Do enough so that someone looking at it can understand what you've done. Think about all the information that someone may want to know about the topics below. See if you can encode this in your visualization.

Topics:

• Consider a baseball, football, basketball game or a round of golf. Design a visualization that encapsulates one of these activities completely.
• Consider all of the different people that go to a grocery store one day, and group each individual's puchases together. Show a visualization of the store activity for the day.
• Consider a stock mutual fund (collection of individual stocks pooled into a portfolio). Design a visualization that captures the fund and shows how it has been doing, which stocks have been contributing, etc.
• Consider the set of CoC or GVU Web pages. Design a visualization that encapsulates them and the information that is in them. This visualization should probably help someone navigate through the data.

Background
Read the following three articles to learn more about this field.

• "Visualization's new tack: Making sense of information," N. Gershon and S. Eick, IEEE Spectrum, Nov. 1995, pp. 38-56.
• "Computer Graphics and Visualization in the Global Information Infrastructure," (Collection of short articles), IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, March 1996, pp. 60-75.
• "IVEE: An Information Visualization and Exploration Environment", C. Ahlberg and E. Wistrand, Proc. of Information Visualization '95 Conference, Oct. 1995, pp. 66-73.

Deliverables
You should turn in your visualization which will probably be on multiple sheets of paper. It should be accompanied by a 3-5 page report which reviews the articles you read (describe what you found most interesting) and that describes your visualization, what it represents, how someone would interact with it, etc.

Evaluation
You will be evaluated on the thoroughness of your review of this area as well as the creativity and thought put into your visualization. Does it adequately convey the topic matter? Is it a good summary of the pertinent information?