The ratings file gives the distribution of quality ratings that people have given each film both as an aggregate number and a distribution eg:

We will also limit the films to those that have already been released as the database includes films that have been announced or are already in production. We will start with films released in 1920, since most early films would be considered short films today.

As with the earlier projects you should first get a copy of the data files and take a look at them to try and understand their structure. Then you need to decide how you want to integrate these various files together into a form that you can visualize. This may involve writing shell scripts or programs to process the files, or loading the information into a database.

For a C you need ...

• be able to pick a genre (eg Drama) from the list given above and shown on the user interface and see a distribution of films in that genre on a well-labeled timeline showing each year from 1920 through 2010.
  
• the user should be able to display the distribution of a genre in several ways - in terms of absolute numbers or  percentage for that year, or how this year compares to the average for this genre over the entire time, since the number of films made per year is highly variable.
• the user should be able to choose a year and see the distribution of all genres for that year
  
• you should check your visualization with a colour blindness tool to see that its ok
• everything should update quickly as you interact

For a B you need to add ...

• the user should be able to pick more than one genre and see their results simultaneously for comparison purposes
• selecting a genre should bring up a listing of the top films in that genre across the entire data set both in terms of the highest rated films and the most popular (which we will use the number of votes for). Note that for top rated films you will need to set a minimum number of votes and that minimum may not be the same across all years of the database.
  
• clicking on a particular year for a genre should show the top 5 films in that genre for that year both in terms of the highest rated films and the most popular
• when choosing a particular year to look at the overall genre distribution, the user should be able to see the top film in each genre for that year.
  
• the user should be able to cluster the results by decade and see the aggregate results for that decade (eg now you would see the top films in the decade not just the year, how this decade compares to others, etc)

For an A you need to add ...

• the user should be able to pick any number of genres and see their results simultaneously to compare the popularity of different genres over time
  
• the user should be able to investigate whether different genres are more commonly released in different times of the year either by seasons or by months and see if this distribution changes over the decades. Here you should only use the films that have information on their month of release in the USA
• the user should be able to choose combinations of genres to see the popularity of films that are in multiple genres
  
• be able to scale the timeline to focus in on different periods in more detail
  

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As with project 2, each Friday each member of the team should post a description of what they did on the project to the project web site. There are more opportunities in this project for different team members to focus on different areas.

As with Project 1 and 2 you should create a web page describing your work on the application. If possible make an embedded applet of your application but the data files may be large so be sure to have a link so people can download your application (and the necessary data files) to run your application. Please make sure that your application is Mac / Windows / Linux compatible. If you can get your app to run online through a browser then do include that version as well. The web page should describe the contribution of each team member (ie who worked on which interface elements, who worked on converting the data into a more usable form, etc.)

Please send me a 1024 x 768 jpg image of your visualization for the web. This should be named p2.<someone_in_your_groups_last_name>.jpg.

Each person in the group should also send me a private email ranking your coworkers on the project on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high) in terms of how good a coworker they were on the project. If you never want to work with them again, give them a 1. If this person would be a first choice for a partner on a future project then give them a 5. If they did what was expected but nothing particularly good or bad then give them a 3. By default your score should be 3 unless you have a particular reason to increase or decrease the number. Please confine your responses to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and no 1/3ds or .5s please. I will average out all these scores for projects 2 through 4 and keep them in mind when assigning final grades.

Each group will present their work to the class and describe its features to the rest of the class. This allows everyone to see a variety of solutions to the problem, and a variety of implementations.

Since we have six groups to go through in 75 minutes, each group will talk for 8 minutes plus 4 minutes for questions from the other groups. The presentation time should be evenly split among all members of the group. Each group sitting in the audience will be allowed one question for the group currently presenting, so come up with a good one. In answering the questions the group presenting should be concise so all of the other groups have a chance to ask questions.