A3-WesleyWillett
From CS294-10 Visualization Fa07
Contents |
[edit] Climate Data Presentation
[edit] Introduction
I propose to construct a set of interactive visualizations intended to deliver an interactive presentation of climate data. These visualizations would duplicate key portions of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth but utilize interactive charts and graphs. The intent would be to utilize live interaction, intelligent selection techniques, and smooth transitions to help presenters give a more engaging version of the presentation.
[edit] Background
This project would build on research in performative visualization I carried out this past summer. However, I plan to take this opportunity to move to a new platform(Jeff's prefuse Flare package) and focus on reconstructing a specific presentation and including a few specific interaction and highlighting techniques. The hope is that constructing a complete (albeit brief) interactive presentation, will help reveal shortcomings in the selection, highlighting, and navigation techniques used.
[edit] Visualizations to be constructed
Line chart of CO2 levels with graphics
Plot of Northern Hemisphere Temperature
Line chart plotting CO2 and Temperature
[edit] Techniques
For all of these visualizations, I plan to support the following interactions:
- interactive emphasis. hover to enlarge text, images and sprites
- utilize generalized selection techniques for selection in visualizations
- custom visualizers to show relative distances in range selection
- custom visualizers to allow dynamic hiding and revealing of data
- smooth navigation between slides
[edit] Data
I plan to utilize several CO2 and temperature datasets. These include short term CO2 sensor data covering the last half-century and ice-core data going back roughly half a million years. Because of the current popularity of this issue, these datasets are readily available on the web. These datasets are somewhat large and I anticipate that I will need to cull them in advance to obtain manageable result for the visualization.
[edit] Platform
I plan to use the alpha prefuse flare toolkit to construct these visualizations.
[edit] Final Piece
A brief description of your final interactive visualization application:
The final visualization provides a four "slide" presentation or set of visualizations mimicking key states in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth talk. These can be navigated between using an accordion interface or using left and right flicks in the are at the bottom of the view. Each of the slides is a visualization on which selections can be made. These selections pair hide/reveal functionality with range indicators, allowing the presenter to more clearly indicate relative changes in CO2 and relative temperature over small periods of time. I used this as an opportunity to experiment with Flare and to try integrating Flare components with Flex code and with components I developed over the summer at Adobe.
An explanation of changes between the storyboard and the final implementation:
I initially planned to set up smooth changes between each of the charts in the application to provide animated transitions at each slide change. However, because each of the charts used a separate data source, this proved impractical and I instead decided to place charts in separate canvases within a Flex Accordion component. I'd hoped to be able to include a more elaborate mechanism to allow a user to change between selection, hide/reveal, and overlaying range indicators - however, given the time constraints, I wasn't able to implement this component.
The bundled source code for your application:
Application (live) Source (zip) (The zip file contains 11 Actionscript Projects (7 are Flare components, 2 are Generalized Selection components (updated to work with the current version of Flare), 1 contains Performative Vis Components, and the last "climates-flex" contains source specific to this assignment (although visualizers in the Generalized Selection class were also modified. To run the application, import all of these libraries into Flex Builder and build (if desired, working executables are included as well) then run 'climates.mxml' in the 'climates-flex' project.)
Commentary on the development process, including answers to the following questions: Roughly how much time did you spend developing your application? What aspects took the most time?
The development process ultimately consumed FAR more time than I'd anticipated - based on my own timekeeping, I spent between 25 and 30 hours on the project as a whole. Considering that most of the code I used drew either from the Generalized Selection codebase or from the work I carried out this summer at Adobe, I'm actually a somewhat surprise by how slow my development was. The largest single block of time - probably about 6 or 7 hours - was devoted to porting the Generalized Selection code to the most recent version of prefuse.Flare. I spent a considerable amount of additional time finding, formatting, and (especially) loading better CO2 and temperature data than I'd used previously and also devoted a large chunk of time to troubleshooting a couple of small, specific issues within the code.
