Andrew Russell

11 Feb 2014

CV – http://rachelbinx.com/Data-Visualization-Senior-Thesis

The bottom project on this page shows how Rachel’s Curriculum Vitae has changed from 2006-2010 based on a few categories. For example, mathematics has always played a decent role in her CV, but music has come and gone over the years. She also breaks down specifics events in her life and how they contributed to certain parts of her CV, for example, she studied in Tokyo in 2009, which grew her language section of her CV. I think this is a very interesting and cool looking way of tracking your own professional life and to see how you have changed over the years.

Wind Map – http://bewitched.com/windmap.html

I remember coming across this project when it was first created in 2012. I was going through the links provided on the course blog and chanced upon it again. I remember spending a lot of time mesmerized over the patterns of the wind. There was something so elegant about the way the wind was mapped that I just had to share it here. Looking at it now, it is still a really neat project. However, I feel like it could have been a bit better implemented with its interactivity. The zoom in and pan is slow and clunky, and the only way to zoom out is through an “unzoom” buttom that appears on the left hand side of the webpage once you zoom in.

Digg Rings – http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/DiggRings

Digg Rings is a tree-ring like visualization of every top story on Digg in a one year period from May 2007 – 2008. Each ring in the tree has a colour that represents the category that the story was in. For example, blue is Gaming while purple is Entertainment. He created tree-rings for the whole year, as well as ones for individual days, days of the week and each month. I really like the look of the rings. I grew up around actual tree-rings so I think that it is cool that the idea is being used to represent other types of data. I don’t know if I would change anything about this, but if I would, I would add some interactivity to it. It would be neat to be able to click on each ring and go to the Digg article that it represented. However, I can see both technical (does the URL still exist?) and UI (the rings are really small) issues about that.