Semester Project
This document describes the semester project for the course.
Students should work on a project in teams of 3 or 4 people.
Expectations will be adjusted according to group size.
The idea of the project is to take the knowledge and background that
you are learning this semester about Information Visualization and put
it to good use in a new, creative effort. A real key to the project,
however, is to select a data set that people will find interesting and
intriguing. Even better would be to select a data set with a clearly
identified set of "users" or "analysts" who care deeply about that
data. Select a topic that people want to know more about! I cannot
emphasize strongly enough the importance of your topic and data set.
Think about the suite of data visualizations that the NY Times has
created over the past few years, a few examples of which are listed below:
No matter what topic you choose, I am expecting a high-quality
project. In particular, I'm seeking creative projects showcasing
interesting ideas. A good project should consist of visualization
designs and a software artifact that implements the designs.
Interaction is key in information visualization, and it is difficult
to understand the interaction issues in your project without a running
system. I am explicitly not expecting user testing and evaluation.
Ideally, I would like your efforts to be innovative and to result in
some form of potential publication.
You are free to choose any software development environment and
graphics/visualization support library that you want in order to help
build your system. Consider developing a system that is
web-deployable so that your system can be shown to everyone in the world!
You will have five main milestones or deliverables. First, you must
form your team and settle on a topic. Second, we will hold a poster
session in class in which you can display your different design ideas
to get feedback. Third, and shortly after the poster session, you
will submit a
detailed design document. Fourth, you
will give a demonstration of your project to the instructor, TA, and class
during the last week of classes. Finally, you will produce a short video (6
minutes or less) that explains your system and shows it in action, and
you will accompany the video by a short tutorial descriptive document.
Important Milestones
Sep 16 - Initial project description. 1-2 page document
listing project members and describing topic to be addressed and
data sources/formats. You should address the following
questions:
What is the problem being addressed?
Who would be interested in understanding this data better?
Where is the data coming from and what are its characteristics?
Make sure to describe the data and its attributes in detail.
Oct 9 - Poster session. Display a number of different design ideas for
your problem in class. I am not looking for glossy, glitzy posters
here. Instead, I want to see a variety of design ideas sketched out
well enough so that other people can understand them and provide
feedback and comments.
Oct 21 - Project design document. Provide more detail (than the
initial project description) about the purpose of the visualization
system, who the users will be, and what data will drive the
visualization. Describe the data attributes in detail. Next, show
different designs for your problem,
leveraging the work that you did for the poster session. Briefly
explain the ideas behind each design. Finally, based on your
work-to-date and feedback from the poster session, describe the
design (or combination of design ideas) that you are leaning toward
at this point in the process. (After this point you will settle on
a design, and we will provide feedback to help with that.)
Dec 2 & 4 (week) - Project presentation. Each team will present
their project in class during the last week of classes. The group
should summarize their topic and data, and provide a short demo of
the system.
Dec 8 - System video. Create a 6 minute or less video
that illustrates the capabilities and example use of your
system. Provide a link to the file or the actual video file itself.
Use .mov or .mp4 format. Accompany this with a 1- or 2-page document
that should be a few pages long and include the following items: team
member names, problem description (1-2 paragraphs), screen shots of
the user interface, brief description of the visualization and how
it works, and a link to the web page for running the system, if applicable.
These things are due at 5pm on Dec. 8th.
Grading
We will evaluate the overall quality of your project,
including all milestones and components. The midway project design
document will be worth 35% of the total grade on the project. It is
important that you make progress on the project quickly. This is
doubly beneficial as it allows more time for your implementation.
The following questions will
be important during that evaluation process.
- Does the system work, ie, does it read in the data and present an
interactive visualization of the data?
- Is the visualization an effective representation of the data?
- Does the visualization support different analytical questions
about the data?
- Is the visualization creative and does it illustrate some new
ideas? (While it is not necessary to invent some new visualization
technique for the project, designs that illustrate creativity and new
thinking will generally be viewed positively. Of course, innovation
cannot be a total substitute for utility.)
- Was your demonstration an effective presentation and illustration
of your project and work?
- Does your video illustrate your system and its use well? Does it
explain the problem and solution well enough so that a person
unfamiliar with the project can appreciate your contribution?
Tips for a Successful Project
It is extremely important to select an interesting problem with data
that some group of people will care deeply about. I cannot stress
enough how vital it is to start with interesting data. Find some
topic that almost everyone cares about (e.g., baby names, feature
films) or that some subset of people really care about (e.g., sports data,
politics). Consider combining different data sets to produce a new
composite data set of special interest. Such a fusion of data often
creates a data set that people want to learn about. You may need to
take a few weeks of the semester where you simply focus on data
acquisition. That's OK. If you do not have your data nailed down by
the poster session then you will be in deep trouble.
Most of the really successful projects of the past from class have
been in one of two styles. In the first style, the group created a
visualization system that has only one view/representation but this
representation is new and creative. Here, you should
focus on designing an innovative new visual representation. The
actual user interface may have different components or
pieces, but it should be tightly integrated. The real focus here is
on creativity and innovation. The second type of successful project
employs multiple coordinated views where each view may use some
well-known visualization techniques, perhaps customized a little for
this problem. The emphasis in this type of project is to create a
sound, functional system implementation that clearly can be of help
for data analysis and understanding. It is important in this type of
project to have coordinated views that work well together and provide
different perspectives on the data. This type of project does not
have the same level of visualization innovation as the first, but it
comes together in a strong system implementation.
One way to create a poor project is to have each group member go off
on their own and implement a different view, where the views
have relatively little to do with each other. Systems like this
usually have an interface where the user picks one of the views, and
then that view takes over the window or screen. I don't consider this
to be a very good example of an effective information visualization.