I'm going to focus on the following data sets for each Pittsburgh neighborhood:
population
area (sq. miles)
household income
educational attainment
occupation
I'm also going to include the same information for Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, and Pittsburgh in order to allow for some zooming in and out and a big picture idea.
I'd like to have the main navigation be a map of the neighborhoods, but I don't want that to be the only place where information is located. Perhaps as you zoom in more information appears alongside the map or in a rollover image. Maybe.
Also, it would be nice to include images that give a sense of the personality of the neighborhoods, so it's not just another dry set of numbers. I think that's what I dislike most about census data--there's no "feel" for the area. Ideally I could do a mashup of the census data and geolocated flickr photos, but I don't have the technical skills for that. Perhaps I could fake it in Illustrator.
Those are my thoughts for now. I still need to do the temporal map.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Pittsburgh census info by neighborhood
After class last night I was thinking that I set myself up for a lot more up front research than I'd really like (I'd rather spend more time on working out the visualizations). So I did some searching around and found this interesting resource: 2000 City of Pittsburgh Neighborhood Census Report (pdf). The document is well-organized, but there's no easy to way to get a big picture view of the data at once. Nor is it easy to compare neighborhoods without flipping back and forth through the pages and matching up the tiny numbers. So I think I'll work with this and see what kinds of visualizations I can come up with.
Digital self - Know your self
Everybody is using Internet, but nobody really cares about what are we actually doing on the Internet. The internet covers everything we need in our daily life. We search for food, map, housing, jobs, friends, and even potential significant others. During the time we build a digital self on the Internet that we barely know about - the browser may knows about this better than ourselves because it stores our daily browsing histories. I found it particularly interesting to observe everybody's daily browsing history that changes over time, which adds up a image of a digital being - your digital self on the Internet, mirroring your inner identity and value.
I want to build a dynamic data information visualization piece, through which you could compare your real self and your digital self, in order to know better about yourself.
Current Problem:
No visualizations for individual browsing history
Audience:
Every Internet User
Context:
Everyday - the data may fluctuate with the time.
I want to build a dynamic data information visualization piece, through which you could compare your real self and your digital self, in order to know better about yourself.
Current Problem:
No visualizations for individual browsing history
Audience:
Every Internet User
Context:
Everyday - the data may fluctuate with the time.
Informal Project Proposal
Being from an area notorious for its high gas prices, I sweat every time I go to the pump. I just don't understand how prices can fluctuate so erratically and hurt my bank account so deeply. I want to look into the reasons behind the rise and fall of gas prices including comparisons of prices across the nation and how oil is heavily connected to our economy. Many ordinary citizens do not know that 1 barrel of oil is 158.987295 liters nor do they understand how heavily dependent we are on oil and the causes and effects of this dependence. I want to ask questions like...
Why are some areas more expensive than others (national/international)
How much does United States political actions (i.e. War in Iraq) hurt our supplies of oil.
How did gas prices effect people's personal lives (traveling, means of transportation to work...)
Traffic
What products did we buy in response to these prices and how automobile manufacturers responded to these prices.
How are cars different now?
The actual price of oil in the market compared to what people pump into their automobiles.
How much of this resource is left on our planet.
Where are they drilling and how many new places are we drilling in?
The purpose of this investigation is to try to help the public understand why gas prices went up so much and to emphasize our great reliance on this diminishing commodity.
Being from an area notorious for its high gas prices, I sweat every time I go to the pump. I just don't understand how prices can fluctuate so erratically and hurt my bank account so deeply. I want to look into the reasons behind the rise and fall of gas prices including comparisons of prices across the nation and how oil is heavily connected to our economy. Many ordinary citizens do not know that 1 barrel of oil is 158.987295 liters nor do they understand how heavily dependent we are on oil and the causes and effects of this dependence. I want to ask questions like...
Why are some areas more expensive than others (national/international)
How much does United States political actions (i.e. War in Iraq) hurt our supplies of oil.
How did gas prices effect people's personal lives (traveling, means of transportation to work...)
Traffic
What products did we buy in response to these prices and how automobile manufacturers responded to these prices.
How are cars different now?
The actual price of oil in the market compared to what people pump into their automobiles.
How much of this resource is left on our planet.
Where are they drilling and how many new places are we drilling in?
The purpose of this investigation is to try to help the public understand why gas prices went up so much and to emphasize our great reliance on this diminishing commodity.
Project Proposal - Nadeem Haidary
BOOKS AS A PULSE ON OUR PLANET
What does comparing where and when an author wrote a book to where and when his characters roam tell us about the temperament of the author's time? Books, as artful reflections of the time in which they are written, give us an intimate glimpse of the mood and ideas that dominated the culture which created them (in a way facts cannot). For example, does a rise in books written about the glorious past point to a growing pessimism about the present? While music, film or a painting also achieves this, the literary artist's work is more closely bounded by worldly constraints like a setting and the format for presenting the work has more or less stayed consistent for hundreds of years.
The data, essentially words, dates, and places, is abstract and almost universally understood and is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future with new books. If one can gain a better understanding of history through a tool that visualizes the real and imagined contexts of books, one could then begin to try understand the present by comparing its real and imagined contexts. Would it be possible to make predictions about the future?
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
I want to visualize this information because I'm curious to see what patterns emerge. A few friends who I shared the idea to also found it interesting and so I hope many more people would be too. However, the obvious audience would be literary critics, authors, historians and librarians. I would like to make the data set cross-cultural, in that books from many different cultures are included.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
While the data exists (SparkNotes, for example, has a 'Key Facts' section for each book to keep this information), there are no visual or holistic representations of it that I know of. If the information is sought, it is done so on a book-to-book basis and not compiled in a way to reveal patterns. Cause and effect go hand-in-hand: because no one has put the data together, no one is thinking about it, and vice versa.
JUST DO IT
I hope to create a visualization (at this point, both print and digital could work) that works in layers: from far away, the patterns are apparent, and looking closer, more and more data is revealed to show outliers, regional data, and the specifics of each datapoint. An interesting context for this information would be the library. Being surrounded by the physical artifacts that get reduced to data points grounds and extends the piece, providing avenues for further exploration of the information. Perhaps such a piece could put books previously read into perspective or act as a tool for finding new books. The concept of mapping real and imagined contexts could provide a strong framework for adding variables (genres, tone, mood) or adding another form of data (music, art, drama, film, religions, inventions) to strengthen the pulse on that historical time.
What does comparing where and when an author wrote a book to where and when his characters roam tell us about the temperament of the author's time? Books, as artful reflections of the time in which they are written, give us an intimate glimpse of the mood and ideas that dominated the culture which created them (in a way facts cannot). For example, does a rise in books written about the glorious past point to a growing pessimism about the present? While music, film or a painting also achieves this, the literary artist's work is more closely bounded by worldly constraints like a setting and the format for presenting the work has more or less stayed consistent for hundreds of years.
The data, essentially words, dates, and places, is abstract and almost universally understood and is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future with new books. If one can gain a better understanding of history through a tool that visualizes the real and imagined contexts of books, one could then begin to try understand the present by comparing its real and imagined contexts. Would it be possible to make predictions about the future?
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
I want to visualize this information because I'm curious to see what patterns emerge. A few friends who I shared the idea to also found it interesting and so I hope many more people would be too. However, the obvious audience would be literary critics, authors, historians and librarians. I would like to make the data set cross-cultural, in that books from many different cultures are included.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
While the data exists (SparkNotes, for example, has a 'Key Facts' section for each book to keep this information), there are no visual or holistic representations of it that I know of. If the information is sought, it is done so on a book-to-book basis and not compiled in a way to reveal patterns. Cause and effect go hand-in-hand: because no one has put the data together, no one is thinking about it, and vice versa.
JUST DO IT
I hope to create a visualization (at this point, both print and digital could work) that works in layers: from far away, the patterns are apparent, and looking closer, more and more data is revealed to show outliers, regional data, and the specifics of each datapoint. An interesting context for this information would be the library. Being surrounded by the physical artifacts that get reduced to data points grounds and extends the piece, providing avenues for further exploration of the information. Perhaps such a piece could put books previously read into perspective or act as a tool for finding new books. The concept of mapping real and imagined contexts could provide a strong framework for adding variables (genres, tone, mood) or adding another form of data (music, art, drama, film, religions, inventions) to strengthen the pulse on that historical time.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Project Proposal - Joshua Zúñiga
Following is my project proposal. Feeback is welcome.
The movie entertainment industry provides many obstacles because content ratings are ambiguous, advertisement and presentation emphasize sensation over information, and judging entertainment value in its current form is difficult. Movies have been filmed for over a hundred years. Advertising compel crowds to enter theatres almost unaware of the type of content they may see. This dichotomy of experience and content information sorely leans to the former. An outcome of this is little in the way of educational advertising. The rate at which the movie industry produces new products compounds the problem of misinterpretation. In order to improve consumer understanding of movie content, quality of the information, and appropriate form of entertainment, the form of movie representation must be restructured so that it can be understood quickly and presented in a way to compare values against content.
Movie fans, families, and content sensitive groups would benefit most from a change to current forms of movie representation. Changes would create a natural mapping from content to relative values of each group, thereby permit decision making instead of impulse buying. This means that content sensitive groups can quickly see where movie popularity may not map to their unit values. Data visualization would allow families to better monitor movie choices and choose the level of appropriateness for their children. Furthermore consumers can visualize when the content is in or out of context.
This information takes form in radio, television, print, and online media. This information is received in different ways and at many different times, therefore it is important that the information be easily reached and understood across different mediums and by different age groups. The constraints of both digital and printed media must be explored so that uniformity can exist across both.
It is important to use both digital and print based media in tandem because of the semi-ubiquitous nature of advertising. Additionally, the one-way communication constraints of viewing the data in print or on television ads mean that consumers must generate understanding within seconds. Digital media also has many possibilities to represent data in a richer form according to individual preferences. Viewers become more empowered by interacting with an environment which one can choose the level of censorship by deciding or simply participating. Movie goers can better predict their experience by gathering and comparing experience goals and values against groups and populations. The rigors of researching a movie can be reduced by means of offloading the burden to simple participation. The result is more meaningful representation of data given to the viewers and data can more easily be compared to the desired experience.
The movie entertainment industry provides many obstacles because content ratings are ambiguous, advertisement and presentation emphasize sensation over information, and judging entertainment value in its current form is difficult. Movies have been filmed for over a hundred years. Advertising compel crowds to enter theatres almost unaware of the type of content they may see. This dichotomy of experience and content information sorely leans to the former. An outcome of this is little in the way of educational advertising. The rate at which the movie industry produces new products compounds the problem of misinterpretation. In order to improve consumer understanding of movie content, quality of the information, and appropriate form of entertainment, the form of movie representation must be restructured so that it can be understood quickly and presented in a way to compare values against content.
Movie fans, families, and content sensitive groups would benefit most from a change to current forms of movie representation. Changes would create a natural mapping from content to relative values of each group, thereby permit decision making instead of impulse buying. This means that content sensitive groups can quickly see where movie popularity may not map to their unit values. Data visualization would allow families to better monitor movie choices and choose the level of appropriateness for their children. Furthermore consumers can visualize when the content is in or out of context.
This information takes form in radio, television, print, and online media. This information is received in different ways and at many different times, therefore it is important that the information be easily reached and understood across different mediums and by different age groups. The constraints of both digital and printed media must be explored so that uniformity can exist across both.
It is important to use both digital and print based media in tandem because of the semi-ubiquitous nature of advertising. Additionally, the one-way communication constraints of viewing the data in print or on television ads mean that consumers must generate understanding within seconds. Digital media also has many possibilities to represent data in a richer form according to individual preferences. Viewers become more empowered by interacting with an environment which one can choose the level of censorship by deciding or simply participating. Movie goers can better predict their experience by gathering and comparing experience goals and values against groups and populations. The rigors of researching a movie can be reduced by means of offloading the burden to simple participation. The result is more meaningful representation of data given to the viewers and data can more easily be compared to the desired experience.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Movie Junkie
I gave a little more thought to the project and may have narrowed it down to a topic which is very interesting to me and others. Movies! As a movie aficionado I think that there are many interesting problems around visualizing movie data such as MPA ratings, movie length, sales, popularity, cast, etc.
As a new parent I found myself thinking about what is appropriate to show my son. What does PG, PG-13, and so on mean? How am I certain that the movies I want to see with my family are both appropriate and entertaining? Is there a way to visualize this information in a way that allows me to avoid dong heavy research when the family wants to see the movie in 20 minutes?
Josh
As a new parent I found myself thinking about what is appropriate to show my son. What does PG, PG-13, and so on mean? How am I certain that the movies I want to see with my family are both appropriate and entertaining? Is there a way to visualize this information in a way that allows me to avoid dong heavy research when the family wants to see the movie in 20 minutes?
Josh
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