Due September 21 CS 7450 - Information Visualization Fall 2015

Homework 3c: Multivariate Data Visual Design

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with further practice in designing visualizations of data. In this assignment, the data set is more complex with many variables. The data set consists of information about whiskeys. (The data set is available via t-square.) This option of the HW is specifically for students who have very little or no programming background. For those students, doing part a or part b of the HW, involving d3 and Processing programming respectively, will likely not be doable in the limited amount of time given. Hence, this version of the HW is a third option for students in that situation.

Your objective in the assignment is to design a static visualization of this data set that will convey its key characteristics to the viewer. This assignment is somewhat analogous to the visualization of a year's worth of weather data from the NY Times. You should represent your visualization on the front of a single piece of paper. You don't need to faithfully and accurately map each variable, but you should provide enough detail so that the idea of your visualization is clear. A key to this assignment is to figure out what you want to represent (and what to omit) and how to represent that. You may have to abstract and summarize different aspects of the data --- think carefully about this! On the back of your paper, or on another sheet, briefly explain your visualization well enough so that we can understand what you have done.

What to turn in: Submit your visualization on one piece of paper and then an explanation of the visualization design.

Grading: We will evaluate the effectiveness of your visualization for communicating the fundamental aspects of the data set. Does it give the viewer a good understanding of the different characteristics of the data? Here, we are looking for both effectiveness and creativity. (We do realize that people have differing levels of design ability and experience. Here, we are looking for a good effort, not necessarily some InfoVis conference paper-worthy new idea. Perhaps you can apply some of the ideas that you've learned from class so far.) The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with experience in the analysis of data like this and the design of visualizations to present the data.