The goal of this project is for you to make use of what you have
been
learning in this class in a project of your choosing (subject to
Andy's
approval.)
This is a group
project, but this time you get to pick your group and your
topic. The
teams can be from size 1 to 3, and the amount of work should
scale
appropriately. The
topic and team member choice are due in a week. This should be
in the
form of a web page listing your group members and enough detail
on your
project that I can review it. You should include information on
what
data you are going to collect and
how you are going to collect it, or information on where you are
going
to get the data from. It should also include some sketches on
what the
interface might look like, and what capabilities the user will
have.
What questions do you want to investigate with your interface?
Some possible ideas:
- Map the spread of old US TV shows to different countries
around the
world - e.g. how far did 'the A-team' spread and at what rate? I
have no
idea if this data is actually available.
- One Idea I had laying around for the user interface class was
to
create the 'crime computer' for UIC's very own super hero:
Spontaneous
Combustion and his/her sidekick Sparky. I think I even have a
drawing
of the hero somewhere by former student Arun Rao. Integrating
and
visualizing crime data at http://files.chicagotribune.com/metro/crime/
among other sites the superhero would know the best times and
places to
patrol.
- You could visualize your own email connections for the past
few years
as a social network graph.
- Similar to the imdb viz, you could do a visualization of all
the
music files you carry around with you and listen to, with
statistics on
genres, years, artists, total, and on a monthly basis.
- There are an increasing number of exo-solar planets that have
been
discovered with information about the size of the planet, its
orbit,
and the kind of star it orbits, which would allow comparisons to
our
solar system, and overall statistics - http://exoplanet.eu/
- There are a variety of movie related drinking games on the web
where
every time you see event X or hear someone say Y you take a
drink (e.g.
every time Rambo shoots someone, or every time someone says 'may
the
force be with you.') One could similarly chart each time these
events
occur on a timeline of the film to look for patterns and
differences
between different films. This one may require more personal
research
time since most of these events have not been time-coded. You
could do
something similar for episodes of a TV series over a season or
follow a
sptrs team through their season.
You
should
create
a
web
page
that
describes
your work on the project. I will be
linking this web page to the course notes
so please send me a 1024 x 768 jpg image of your visualization for
the
web. This
should be named p5.<someone_in_your_groups_last_name>.jpg.
Again,
please make
sure that your application is Mac / Windows / Linux compatible.
Again,
the web page should describe the contribution of each
team member.
Each group will bring their visualization to class to present it
and
describe
its features to the rest of the
class. This time there will be two
presentations. The first is a short interim presentation before
Thanksgiving to get some feedback on your design and the current
implementation from the class. The final presentation is during
the
final exam period.
last revision
11/27/09 - added in another possibility for the next class