I have a few ideas for the types of data I’d like to work with for my Info Vis project but I’m not sure which would be the most interesting, have relatively accessible information, and/or lend itself to an interesting visualization. A lot of my ideas pertain to Judaism, which has a lot of somewhat complicated laws that might be easier to learn/understand if they could be visualized:
1. Information pertaining to Koshrut (i.e. whether Jews are allowed to eat certain types of food). The types of information I could obtain about Koshrut is pretty diverse; I could gather information about the specific laws and whether these came from the Torah or the Misnah (basically if it is the 5 books of Moses or is from the Rabbis), as well as a more practical focus on what products you can actually buy in a super market, what companies they come from, what level of Koshrut they pertain to, etc.
2. Laws and Customs specifically pertaining to Shabbat (the day of rest from Friday evening to Saturday evening). There are a lot of dos and don’ts when observing Shabbat, as well as different customs that are followed by different types of Jews. Usually these customs are dependent on what part of the world a specific family is from.
3. Prayers – when, where, with who, for what purpose is each prayer supposed to be said – pretty self-explanatory
I am also really interested in the diversity of Jews both in terms of location and in terms of level of practice. Given this,
4. Assimilation of Jews in different countries, or maybe specifically the US – how, when, why Jews began to assimilate, what traditions they continue to follow and which were deemed to extraneous to keep up with, where most assimilation occurred, etc.
5. Different Customs – different Jews around the world have varying customs for different aspects of Judaism, which types of Jews follow what customs, where and why these customs originated, etc.
I have a few other ideas that have nothing to do with Judaism but are just various things that I like/am interested in:
6. Pronunciations of English words and where they are used – different parts of the country pronounce certain words differently and it would be interested to be able to explore this using data vis and possibly audio as well
7. Price is Right Data – I don’t know about the rest of you but I have been watching this show ever since I was little and by now know every game pretty much by heart but I’ve kind of always wondered if you are actually on the show what is the best game to play in terms of having the best chance of winning. I think it would be interested to explore the payoffs of different games using probability models.
8. My iTunes Data – I’ve noticed that my taste in music has changed a lot over the past few years and my iTunes pretty much has a record of this through the play count and the last played data it tracks. It would be interested to see the progress in my own personal music taste by visualizing this (and maybe other) data.
9. Twilight Zone – I love this show and I don’t know specifically what data I would want to scrape regarding this show but there are definitely a lot of different kinds of data that I could scrape so I think there are possibilities.
10. Roller Coaster Data – Ever since I was about 8 I’ve been kind of a roller coaster junkie and I personally rate every one I right even internally or through description to friends or family. It would be cool to extract data about different types of roller coasters to get more of an objective comparison to go along side my subjective one.
11. Harry Potter – I through this one in here just for the hell of it. There are definitely lots of things that could be tracked about the books but I think it would be cool to do some sort of timeline and/or relationship graph of the entire series.
I know this is a lot, sorry for causing anyone who read this post to read so much!