Post a SHORT note on your project progress here. Please post by tomorrow night, 11/28. Include a sentence or two about what you’ve been up to, and links to any reference material (such as existing example visualizations or projects that inspired you, etc) that you’ve found useful, and be sure to note any challenges that you might have encountered!
Example Update: “This week I cleaned my data and made a plan to return to the library to take photos on Saturday. My main difficulty so far is determining which fields I will use in the visualization– is the media type important? I found this review of using maps in visualization helpful.”
Unfortunately, I have not been able to make much progress on my research since I can’t make it to BHS till Saturday. In the meantime, I am trying to figure out the best way to get the front pages of the NYT by tracking down a copy of The New York Times Complete Front Pages (http://www.amazon.com/New-York-Times-Complete-1851-2009/dp/1579128254), and exploring Proquest Historical Newspapers.
Yesterday, I was able to collect data from the January & February issues of The New York Woman Magazine. Instead of comparing the contents to the NYT, I have changed my mind and will compare to recent issues of Cosmopolitan. On their website you are able to get the covers of recent issues, where you can see the headlines. Unfortunately, I can only purchase the most recent issue on stands (getting back copies will take too much time).
After cleaning up the Morrell data and going over Zannah’s notes and links, I realized that I was being a little overly ambitious. My revised plan is to make a cloropleth map that shows the density of photographs for each neighborhood. I’ll make a second more analog map of one neighborhood to show the frequency of subjects. Counting the subjects for the whole collection would be too complicated.
First problem: I have an Excel with all the neighborhoods listed but I can’t figure out how to count the frequency of each one. Pivot tables, maybe? I’ll work on that tomorrow. Second problem: I can’t find a good SVG map to start will. I’m going to try bring something like this http://media.wnyc.org/media/photologue/photos/lilbrooklynsm.jpg into Illustrator.
I’m going to need a lot of help from Zannah and Sepand to make the cloropleth map work.
Mary, if there’s not a simple way to do this in Excel, you can write Processing code that will do a concordance of a text– meaning it will count the frequency of each word or phrase appears. Sepand and I can get you set up with this, but see if you can write some pseudocode for the steps to do this. You might start…
load the data into processing using load strings,
loop through the data array,
and…
I am still working with the data – I have the NYC Projected Population data in csv and xls formats (unsure which is best in Processing or does it matter?). I’m deciding which data to use from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network as it has many variables, which leads me to my first problem:
The population data is projected (future) and the organ donation data is historic. I’m assuming that working with the data as is will be a problem, except for the time period they overlap (the present). I really want to use the projected population data because of the insight it can provide into potential problems/solutions for social issues. However, I’m wondering if I should just scrap the population data altogether and just use the organ donation data by itself (there’s plenty of data to tell the story): http://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/latestData/step2.asp
Lastly, I plan to use Processing, but I’ve ran across another method of interaction which I’m psyched to pursue! One of my pressing questions about this cause has been the effectiveness of the tools being used to promote organ donation. I feel for the most part people just overlook it especially if it’s a graph with numbers. Are there more effective methods? I ran across videographics and hope I can learn how to put one together (in less than 2 weeks!) to see how I can tell the story in a more compelling way. Videographics are a great method to use for storytelling. I would provide links to some cool ones, but that’s my presentation on Thursday
).
I am slightly behind on my timetable, but I have completed the parsing of the folded maps data, and will hopefully finish the flat maps data tonight. This weekend I will be working on the MAX functionality (I appreciated your suggestion to not do this in max, and in fact I could easily do it for the web in Javascript, but a personal goal for me in this class is to get comfortable using data with MAX/MSP). Also, as I teach a lab on Saturdays, I won’t be able to attend the BHS outing.
I’ve just from BHS and I realized I basically need to reimagine my entire project. Looking at your suggestions, Zannah, I think you could tell that I was being entirely too ambitious. To do what I was proposing to do would have been AT LEAST a semester’s worth of work, if not an entire year! I didn’t really get that until I started going over the letters this afternoon.
That said, I still really want to work with the letters? I love them. But as you said, I need to zero in on just a small part. And while I would love to focus on an exchange between the two, given the way the letters are organized, it’s really hard to see what letters are responses to which. Some of them aren’t even dated. So, I think I’m going to focus on Al’s letters to Lucy. We can discuss this more tomorrow as the idea isn’t totally fleshed out yet, but I would like to visualize each letter – perhaps 10 or so? I feel inspired by Nicholas Felton, in that I think I will show, for instance, how many times Al says “I love you” in a letter, or in some way visualize the time of day it was sent, and the kind of words he used.
I know it might be easier to use some of the data sets that we already “have,” but unfortunately I’ve fallen in love with these letters and I just really want to work with them.
Hopefully after I’ve returned to BHS tomorrow with my new idea, I’ll have more to report in class tomorrow night.
I’m scheduled to revisit BHS this Saturday, and I really like Zannah’s idea of building a sample user experience for the app mockup so I’m going to approach the BHS visit through that lens. I have to choose which sample user to channel, and I think it will be a middle or high school student who wants to use the app to help create a school presentation. This will help me focus when choosing what to photograph and document.
I will definitely have hand drawn sketches of the mockup for tomorrow’s class as it is much easier to visually map it that way in the first phase. I tried using PowerPoint and got sucked into minutia way too quickly.
I’ve found an app called “App Cooker” which would let me demonstrate my app mockup on my iPad! Not sure if it will work out though since it seems like you have to design the app inside App Cooker, but it could be cool.
Project update:
- I did paper-and-pencil sketches for the visualization outcome –how I want it to look at the end.
- I narrowed down the questions –following Zannah’s advise- to focus only on one portion of the data, as my data set is huge.
- I revised Zannah’s suggested links for inspiration and ideas.
- I want to ask Zannah about the code on network visualizations she mentioned and also, I want to ask Mary about the code she used to visualize images / pictures in processing (I’ll ask you both tomorrow in class!).
since I haven’t had access to the collection yet I am kind of flying blind. BUT, I have started putting together my storyboard. Hopefully once I sit down and work with the collection It’ll be easier to put different pieces into the storyboard.
Zannah – what kinds of things should I bring to BHS to collect info? I’ll come armed with a piece of paper, pencil and camera. Do you think they’ll let me take high res images w/o flash if I bring my dslr?