Due:
Tuesday, Feb 19, for students with last name starting with A-K.
Thursday, Feb 21, for students with last name starting with L-Z.
Bring hardcopy of report to class. This assignment should be done on an individual basis, and should be entirely your own work.
Objective:
The goal of this homework is to experience and practice the use of visualization tools, accustom yourself to seeing data in new ways, discover something new in a data set, and think critically about visualizations. Your assignment is to find some interesting data, explore it using some visualization tools, and write a short report.
Instructions:
Data: Find some data of interest to you. The data should be of a tabular form, and must have at least 500 records (rows) and at least 5 attributes (columns). Here are some data ideas: census data, sports data, stock market data, university rankings, scientific data, library catalogues, ...
Visualization: Select 2 of the following visualization tools to examine your data. The tools have documentation about their data formats.
- Spotfire (by Spotfire)
- Table Lens (Eureka by Inxight), download
- Parallel Coordinates (XmdvTool by WPI), download, file format
The tools are installed on the machines in McBryde 104c (inside of McB104). You have Hokie card access to these rooms. In using the lab, please be sure to leave the machines in the same state as when you arrived (don't save files to the machines), and be sure to close the doors and turn off the lights in the lab if you are the last one out. Security is critical. There are meetings held and experiments being run in the lab at certain times -- please yield to these people when necessary. Violation of these rules can result in revocation of lab privileges and an F on the homework.
Report: Write a 2 page report about your data findings and about the visualization tools you used. Of course, screenshots (Alt-PrintScrn, then paste) are a necessity for a good report, and make sure you label and/or describe your screenshots so that others can understand it. Keep in mind that we will read 70 of these, so think of your paper as a user interface and shoot for good usability. Your report should address the following points:
- What data set did you choose to analyze? How many records are there, and what are the different attributes of the data?
- What questions did you want to answer about the data? What did you discover in the data? Did the tools reveal anything interesting or surprising about the data?
Why are these discoveries important? Why are they difficult to discover without using the tools?- Were the tools helpful in answering your questions and making discoveries? Provide a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the visualization techniques? Which visualizations helped you answer which questions better and why? Focus your answers on the main visualization techniques used by these tools, not nitpicky little things about the tools themselves such as data formats.