Category Archives: data visualization

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I hope you had the time of your life….a reflection on SIF

  April 20, 2015 , , , ,

As finals week quickly approaches, we are working at full capacity to bring projects to a space of completion.  And while the thought of the end of the semester brings along with the quintessential dialogue of, “…gosh…where did the time go?” Indeed, where did it go? It went into projects, big and small, that have brought new resources and information to the Georgia State community. Each click of the mouse bringing us closer and closer to the creation of a tool or resource which did not previously exist.  Through this post, I’d like to take a moment to look back and summarize the SIF experience. What you all have hopefully learned from me:  1) Maps have power  Maps, even within the current communication age which we are living in, still remain undervalued and misunderstood.  Maps gain our trust just by the mere act of being maps. They have the power to explain the world in ways that words do not. As I was told during a recent interview for my own thesis project, ” If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a million.” The ways we are making maps in changing. We should be critical of maps and understand the different viewpoints from which they are created 2) How to make your own maps  Throughout the blog post I have been able to offer a number of step by step guides to supply readers with some starting points to Google Earth  work and tools like Batch Geo. Additionally, over the year … Continue reading

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Deliberation map is born!

  March 1, 2015 , ,

Project: Online Deliberation Mapping Tool Development As planned, version 1.0 of deliberation map was completed. It includes following features: 1. There can be only one seed for the deliberation map. When the map starts, it will look like this. 2. Any body can post and reply, without logging in. So, it is open to public. When deliberation map is running on a server, whosoever gets access to the URL of the deliberation map, can add posts to it. As a consequence, two users, probably from two different computers, can view and edit the map at the same time. Changes made by one user will be reflected to all others when the map is refreshed at the viewer’s end. 3. Currently map refreshes at a particular client computer when a new post is added by a user at the client computer, it is NOT refreshed at all other clients viewing the map. 4. The view is in a tree like fashion. Reply to a post is in the next level. Within a level posts will be in chronological order with earliest on the left and the latest on the right. 5. When a post is added, the map rearranges and scales dynamically to adjust the display to show all the posts on the map. The nodes, representing the post, decreases in size automatically to fit into the display. For example, the map changes to look as follows:   Technical Details The deliberation map has been implemented using ASP.NET technology. It has been … Continue reading

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Filling in the gaps

  February 3, 2015 ,

Project: Online Deliberation Mapping Tool Development Before we start implementing the project, we need to decide the timelines and milestones so that the product can evolve in a systematic fashion. To do this, we needed to prioritize the features and decide which features are going to be in the version 1.0 of the product. Further, we needed to fill in the gaps, that is, those aspects of the tool which may not be features per se but would be necessary for the product to be functional. The priority features for the version 1.0 are :- Structure of display of the posts would be in a tree line fashion. We tried time line representation and concentric circle representations and various flavors of tree representations, finally we decided to go with a tree model which would make the deliberation intuitive to follow and easy to contribute to. An approximate sketch of the tree representation is :- Time slider : Users entering the conversation should be able to see the state of the deliberation at any previous point in time. Types of connections between posts. A reply to a post can be of neutral, agree or disagree type. These will be represented by different colored edges connecting the appropriate posts. Another distinct color will be allocated for edges representing connection between a post and a question to that post. There should be visual cues to the annotations to a post. We came up with a name “annotaticons” for such visual cues. Subsequent questions that arose during design … Continue reading

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Playing around with data visualization and early modern texts

  January 26, 2015 , ,

As the Hoccleve project nears our first major milestone, the digital publication of an edition of Hoccleve’s holograph poems, we are beginning to ask questions about how to transform our XML into an HTML display. Thus, we are embarking on a graph design/display phase of our work. One of the things we have been discussing is creating data visualizations of the poems as an ornament to the edition. Most likely, these will be simple. Word clouds for instance. I have been asked to explore some options for this. This is not something that I have done before, but it is something that I have been curious about as a tool for my own work. Because the plain text versions of the poems weren’t quite ready, I decided to take a little time to begin explore what might be possible, from a historical perspective, with data visualization tools. I also figured it would make an interesting first blog post of the semester, even if at this point my foray into data visualization and data mining is completely amateurish. Even so, I am reporting on some early experiments using Voyant, a free web-based tool for textual analysis. I want to to see how it worked with early modern texts and with some of the documents I am using for my dissertation. This post is also offered in the spirit of a simple review of the software. My dissertation is a study of relations of power between the English and Native Americans in colonial … Continue reading

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Hole in History

  December 7, 2014 , , , , , ,

As you all may know, I am a part of a team of awesome SIFs who are working on an educational, innovative project. The project is aimed towards recreating an interactive virtual 3D model of the intersection of Decatur St. and Ivy St. (now Peachtree Center Ave.) in what it would have been like in the 1930s. Working on this project for the last semester has shed light in the fact that the project has taken a lot more time and energy than expected, while also hitting several bumps on the road. To me, that’s no problem as I know that all great masterpieces (not implying that our project will live up to the word “masterpiece”) take hard work, time, and dedication. Currently we have been at a standstill with the project because of one fact: there is a lack of pictures of the street during the 1930s. In order to resolve our problem, My job for the project was to search the internet inside and out for any pictures of buildings, preferably head-on shots, that would aid in recreating the building in a virtual 3D model as accurately as possible. Another SIF was setting up the 3D world in the game engine called Unity. As the search continued and the results were very disheartening and minimal, we decided to look to outside sources for help. One of our project supervisors heard that Emory was attempting to recreate the city of Atlanta into virtual 3D model in a similar project. … Continue reading