2010 Project 2

Shaking Through

Project due at 11:59pm Monday 10/11/10 Chicago time



Project 2 will be the first group project and will focus more on representing data simultaneously in multiple ways. Given the quick turnaround time on these projects you should get your team together quickly and decide on roles.

You should also very quickly set up a web page for your project and send the URL to andy. Each Friday of the project each team member should post on the project web site an overview of what he/she did on the project that week.



This project will look at data that can be visualized both in a graphs and in geospatial and temporal forms.

As in Project 1 you will be creating a web page. The final data download may be a little heavy so you should also provide a downloadable version. The application should have obvious and intuitive controls.

Unlike project 1, before you visualize this data you will need to convert it into appropriate form(s).


The data we will use in this project comes from the US Geological Survey's Global Earthquake Search site at
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/epic_global.php

If you ask for spreadsheet format data from the USGS/NEIC (PDE) from 1973 to present you will get a 30 megabyte comma separated list of quakes that starts with:

Year, Month, Day, Time(hhmmss.mm) UTC, Latitude, Longitude, Magnitude, Depth
  1973,01,01,034609.80, -9.21, 150.63,5.3, 41
  1973,01,01,052229.80,-15.01,-173.96,5.0, 33
  1973,01,01,092857.20,-22.16, -65.79,4.8,205

There are over 620,000 earthquakes in this file but some do not have a magnitude so you should filter out all of the lines that are not complete. This should leave you with about 500,000 lines of data.

The tool you develop should help the user investigate questions about earthquakes. Is there a regular pattern in time between larger earthquakes? Is there a pattern to the aftershocks of a larger quake? Are there smaller quakes or an absence of quakes that precede a large quake?


For a C you need ...



For a B you need to add ...


For an A you need to add ...



There is code that integrates modest maps with processing here: http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/modest_maps_interactive.zip



As with Project 1 you should create a web page describing your work on the application. This time instead of embedding the processing application you should 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.

When the project is done, 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 to projects 2 through 4.

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.



last revision 10/10/10 - more info added on class presentations.