Project: Proposal

Assigned: Monday, Apr 10, 2017

Due: Monday, Apr 17, 2017 at noon

Collaboration: You should work on your visualization in groups of three students. We will spend some time in class working to identify potential groups and topics.

Submitting your work: Send your written proposal and electronic versions of your proposal images to me by email. Please bring three printed copies of your proposal text and images to class on Monday.

The first step in our data visualization project is a proposal. Your proposal will help to guide you during the implementation process, so any time we spend here should help you focus later on in the process. We’ll also use a peer review process to get early feedback on proposals, which should help you address issues in your visualization that you may not have thought of on your own.

Use the following structure for your proposal:

Part A: Purpose

A visualization is supposed to help users learn something from a dataset that is difficult to learn looking just at the data. This could be a single question with a complex answer, or a collection of questions that require some careful examination. In this part of your proposal, you will identify the questions you want to answer and make a case that these questions are interesting and important enough to justify a visualization.

Write two to three paragraphs that clearly address the following questions:

What questions will users be able to answer using your visualization?
What could those answers be? Make your best guess as to what you will find.
What makes these questions complex enough to require a visualization?
Why are these questions important?

Give any background information that a reader will need to understand your answers. Your target audience is another student in your class.

Part B: Design

The design of your visualization plays an important role in its usefulness. Your visualization’s design should be derived from its purpose; aesthetic choices are important, but try to design a visualization that will help users to answer the questions you have identified, not just one with flashy animations. Your visualization must have an interactive component, so you will need to think about both the high-level view of the visualization and how interaction will change the visualization.

This part has both visual and written components:

Make at least two images of your visualization (hand drawings are fine). Show the visualization in its original state, and a second image that shows how user interactions will change the visualization.
Explain how your visualization will work. Reference the drawing, and connect your design back to your answers to the questions in part A.

Part C: Techniques

Now that you have a high-level design of your visualization, you will need to think about how you will actually implement it. In this section, you should address the following questions:

Where will the data for your visualization come from? Look closely at every dataset you plan to use to make sure it will actually meet your needs.
What kinds of computations or transformations will you need to get your data into the visualization?
Are there any D3 or data processing techniques you will need that we have not covered? If you have an example of a technique you would like to use, please include a link with your proposal.

As you work on these questions, think about how you will structure your implementation. What kinds of helper functions will you need? Will you build on an existing visualization or start from scratch? How will you manage the data for your visualization? You do not have to answer these questions in your proposal, but you may want to take notes during your discussions and proposal preparation to help you later in the process.