index.utf8.md

Example Visualizations

These are some visualizations that class members found on the first day of class.

Yukun Tu

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It simulates how one million points would end up on a fluid globe in 50 years. This vividly demonstrates how garbage in the North Pacific Ocean drifts
Good
It is dynamic. Simply visual encodings(only two colors) make a clear point. The length of the video is not long so that people can find the trend before running out of their patience.

Henri Prudhomme

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It is a visualization of the rise and fall of unemployment rates since 1948. There are no interactive components
Good
It conveys information clearly and enhances the message of the visualization which is that the 2008 recession had much worse employment rates than other surrounding years.

Brian Goins

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This visualization is of flights throughout Thanksgiving day in 2015. The different colors of each plane represent the airline and you can also use the scroll bar on the bottom left to change the time of day and stop and see different flights.
Good
I gave this a good classification because it is easy to see and everything has consistency, there is no weird colors and all the planes are the same shape and animation.

Adam DenHaan

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The overall theme of the two visualizations here are migrant deaths. At the bottom is a date histogram of migrant deaths, where the x-axis is time (divided by month), and the y-axis is amount of deaths. The top visualization is a map with shaded circles at certain locations, with size of circle representing amount dead/missing.
Good, Bad
The top visualization was good because it gave a quick geographical overview of the locations of these incidents. The bottom was almost good, but I would have liked a scale showing numbers to see how many died/missing, and thus it was bad.

Nate Walter

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This visualization is an interactive map of Europe. Each country has a different shading based off of the countries’ perceived religiosity. When you hover over each nation, the percentage of “highly religious” people appears. You can also select a specific country from a drop down menu. This produces a series of bar graphs with national averages of religious questions answered affirmatively. The highly religious percentage is calculated from the other yes/no questions.
Good
I think that this is a good visualization. It is not particularly complicated but its simplicity is done well. The map is a helpful overview and the individual nation selection is necessary to see some of the details. I would personally like to see a little more specifics in the data, such as what religion the interviewee is. I would imagine that European Muslims and Christians would answer differently.

Tom Takeuchi

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This video shows the timeline of national flags from the year of 1444 to 2015, but I am not sure how the visualization was created. I thought it was very interesting to see the dynamic change of world’s national flags over the years. I also thought it would make it easier to learn about historical events with this visualization.
Good, Bad, Ugly, Wrong
Even among good figures, some of them are better than others, and there might be some parts that can be improved, so I would say good visualizations still have not-so-good components to be fixed. Bad, Ugly, and Wrong visualizations obviously have bad and wrong components, but they still might have some good components such as color choice, or name of the variables. I think it is somewhat hard to tell if they have good components until we actually see the visualization. The most interesting aspect of the visualization for me is that there are numerous ways to represent and convey the data, and even subtle changes could result in a huge difference in the efficiency of conveying the information about the data.

Ally Boyd

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This visualization is showing all the flights that is going out of the US on Thanksgiving 2015 from midnight to 7am the next day
Good, Bad
Well this visualization is not ugly because it shows different colors for the different airlines; however, does not have too much going on that it is so busy or bland that it looks ugly. It also seems like it flows nice and you could see a lot of flights and able to zoom in a out if you want to see more specific places. However, it does not let you see how many flights in total on that day/airline/etc which I would assume is something you would really want to know for this data. Also, the color dotted lines that represent the flights go quite fast across the board, so it’s hard to see all the different ones unless you paused the simulation.

Emma E Schroer

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This visualization will form a red and black tree with inputed values. The Visualization shows what steps are taken to input a value. It also demonstrates step for removal of a value and searching a graph. The dynamic aspect can also be slowed down, and there are options to include additional information like null leaves.
Good
I think the data visualization is highly effective in communicating how a red and black tree works. My only criticism would be the font of the numbers is a little bit small, but this is not bad enough to make the graph ugly.

Kris Miedema

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The graphic shows the per capita food availability in pounds for different fruits and vegetables. It uses colors to show in what form that food was eaten. Interactively components are you can choose what data you see for example you can sort to see only availability for fresh fruits. Also the cursor will show you the number of pounds available for that type and method.
Ugly
I don’t think the colors go together well also on my computer the scale of the graphic is such that I can’t see the whole thing so I am always scrolling. So I think visually it is difficult to understand.

David Sen

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The marvel cinematic universe and its characters is being visualized as an interconnected web of people and their relations to each other. You can rotate or pan around the space or zoom in on a specific person and see information about them such as the movies they were in or their friends.
Ugly, Wrong
Though I like the topic, it isn’t up to date on the events that transpired in the latest marvel movies, such as it lists Tony Stark as alive, which makes it wrong, at least, if people intend to use it to portray the current status. It’s also a little ugly, because they use cartoon images of people’s faces as the icons in the web. Some more distinguishable characters are easy to tell who is who, but some are hard to tell without clicking on them.

Lauren Steffen

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It is a map of the world surrounded by a circle of bars extending outward. The bars represent a day of the year that is a public holiday in at least one country in the year 2017. Months are indicated with alternating colors of groups of bars (Jan starting with orange in the top right and going clockwise). The longer a bar, the more countries recognize that day as a holiday. Interactive components - you can click on a country or a bar to keep only or exclude it from the visualization, and if you hover the mouse over a country it will tell you how many holidays it celebrates. Hovering the mouse over a bar will tell you how many countries celebrate that day.
Good, Bad
The whole visualization is a little small so it can be a little challenging to select the country or bar you want. You can hardly see some of the countries; however, the good qualities outweigh the bad, in my opinion. I think the alternating colors for changing months is a good idea because a distinct color for each month might be too busy and a gradient of color wouldn’t show enough distinction between the months. I think the length of each bar in the circle for each day of the year that is a potential public holiday is a creative and understandable way of displaying the information of how many countries celebrate a holiday that day of year.

Advait Scaria

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Worldshapin visualizes a country or continent’s health standards, population, education, living standards, carbon footprint, and workplace equality on a graph. It contains interactive elements that allows for the selection of different countries or continents which then allows us to make comparisons of different countries’ or continents’ shapes of graphs as they are overlay-ed on top of each other.
It also has a timeline ranging from 1980 to 2011 which can be dragged or “played” to see the changes of a country or continent’s graph shape over time. It also presents a simple horizontal bar chart for each added country in the area below the main graph that also changes as the year or timeline is changed.
Good
I think this visualization is quite good overall – it is very simple to understand, doesn’t contain anything objectively wrong, and is aesthetically pleasing.

There are some limitations to it however. Firstly the main graph doesn’t contain any numbers and we are only able to see the “shape” of a country’s graph without having any clue what the actual size of that component (such as population or carbon footprint) is. To get those numbers we must scroll down to the individual bar charts that are generated for each added country.

Second, it doesn’t allow for the comparison of too many countries’ graph shapes at the same time. It gets too cluttered if a lot of countries are added and it isn’t as easy to see the change over time. So it is more suited to make comparisons for a few countries rather than a whole bunch of them.
Sometimes there was an issue with the bar charts below the main graph that made the spacing between two countries’ charts non existent – so those two charts were side by side making it a little harder to read. This might be the only really ugly part to it but it seems like a small bug.

Ivan

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Programming subreddits by number of members
Good
It is easy to tell how much bigger a subreddit is compared to others, there is also a color gradient showing the increase of members. All of the data is in a same axis and the graph is easy to read and visually appealing

Ian Park

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It is a visualization of population of dog breeds and dog names in New York City.
Good, Slow… (at least on my laptop)
The visualization is very pleasing aesthetically (not ugly). It is clear and simple in what it is trying to convey (not bad). Likewise, the mathematics seems to be accurate (not wrong). It also uses a color map to display the data more intuitively.

Joseph Jinn

link
https://www.cavernsoftime.net/

Visualization of the player population and player movement on the continent of Azeroth in the MMORPG World of Warcraft.

There is a slider that allows speeding up or slowing down the passage of time.

Can select different categories corresponding to different areas, raids, etc., in WoW.

Green: low population in the area. Red: high population in the area.
Animated paths depict player movement from one region to another.
Good, Bad, Ugly
It could be confusing as to what is being represented if you don’t read the article that links to the visualization website itself.

The visualization could use at minimum a title and some labels to clarify what is happening.

When holding down left-click and dragging the map around, the overlayed player population and movement becomes out-of-sync with the world map.

A nice morning-nighttime effect that brightens or darkens the visualization based on time-of-day.
Could probably have used an actual water texture (perhaps animated) instead of a flat shade of blue.

Bryant George

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The visualization represents numbers as a collection of circles which are grouped together according to their prime factorization. As an example, 357 is 1773 so there are 17 groups of 7 groups of 3. You can pause, play forward/backward, and play forward/backward but sped up.
Good, Improvable
I think it’s good in the sense that it helps to visualize what makes one number prime and another number composite. I also find the sped up modes to be both enjoyable to watch as well as useful for conceptualizing the frequency and patterns among primes. Overall it’s fairly visually pleasing though the numbers at the left corner could be larger or otherwise more prominent to allow easier comprehension. I think it could be greatly improved upon with greater interactivity by allowing you to start from a given number, manage speed more finely, displaying/visualizing other stats like gap since previous prime, etc. Really I think it’s a good base which could be improved upon.

James Eapen

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This graph shows the human genome, chromosomes, genes and annnotations to the genome. Clicking on a chromosome and a gene segment shows its sequence and the protein it codes for and where the proteins work.
Bad, Ugly, Accessibility of a large dataset
It is hard to understand at first. While there are labels for the genome, they could use more description about them. It took some work before I realized that the organ names indicate where the protein is active. It is, however, interesting because it puts all these variables together and allows for the visualization of a chromosome segment, its genes, and proteins in parallel for making comparisons and finding overlaps. The genome is an extremely large dataset and this map makes it accessible.

Abigail Leon

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This visualization shows the schedules of famous people and how they broke up their day. I think it’s interesting to see how you can break up the individual tasks and eventually piece together the full schedule/day.
Good
I think it is a good visual because it is really easy to understand and see how the pieces fit together. It is also aesthetically pleasing and the colors aren’t contrasting one another. Nothing is too distracting and I can follow along easily.

Jacob Brink

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It shows which countries showed concern for Australia by analyzing number of tweets with certain hashtags.
Good
The data is neat and organized with a clear scale of time on the x axis and unique users on the y axis.

Ryan Vreeke

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It is a Player Rating vs. Value interactive graph that lets you tap on a dot that represents a soccer player and it gives you their name, value, and rating as a player. NOTE: this data visualization I am referring to is part of the #5. 2018 FIFA World Cup ratings when you scroll down on the page a little. It then is the graph labeled Player Rating vs. Value that I am referring to.
Good
Good because it is clear the value and rating that a player has and you can compare players easily to others and use the graph to help understand the differences. Also has definitions of Rating and Value.

Ryan Vreeke

link
It is a Player Rating vs. Value interactive graph that lets you tap on a dot that represents a soccer player and it gives you their name, value, and rating as a player. NOTE: this data visualization I am referring to is part of the #5. 2018 FIFA World Cup ratings when you scroll down on the page a little. It then is the graph labeled Player Rating vs. Value that I am referring to.
Good
Good because it is clear the value and rating that a player has and you can compare players easily to others and use the graph to help understand the differences. Also has definitions of Rating and Value.

Sam

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This visualization shows world migration from 2010 to 2015. It is dynamic in that it is constantly moving, and is interactive. The user can isolate a single country by clicking on it, and can identify migration flow numbers by hovering a country.
Good
I think this visualization is good because it is informative in that it shows the general trends it wants to portray (international migration), it looks generally appealing (every time I see it i’m interested), and any frozen screen can be printed out. However, I think there is room for improvement in color scheme and use of dots. Also, I am assuming that the math/statistics/data behind this visualization is accurate.

Carson Ellis

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The visualization shows the three political parties, which are represented in the U.S. congress, and breaks down the demographics of those congressional members. The visualization uses several stacked bars. The original creator says they used ggplot2 in R to create the visualization.
Ugly
I feel the color choices used don’t create a nice aesthetic. Also, with the scale used it is hard to get a feel for the actual values. I also do not love how the three parties with gender are labeled . I would have preferred each column to be labeled individually.

Mattheus Colyn

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The thing being visualized is police shootings in the US. The visualization does this in three ways. First, it shows the number of police shootings this year with a small rectangle representing each individual shooting. This physically displays the number of shootings, giving some context to the large number. Second, it shows a graph comparing the number of police shootings each year going back to 2015. This serves to show how these numbers have changed over time. Third, it shows a map of the US with a dot representing each shooting at the location it took place. Additionally, each state is shaded lighter or darker based on the ratio of shootings per million citizens.
Good
As the textbook said, a visualization should be classified as “good” or at least adequate if it cannot be clearly labeled as flawed. I don’t think the visualization is “bad” because I think it is clear and easy to understand. I suppose the visualization could be “wrong” as I haven’t looked at the statistics it’s based on, but it has citations for the data and a link to download it yourself, so I am choosing to trust the validity of the visualization for the purposes of this exercise. Lastly, I do not think the visualization is ugly because personally I think it is clear and pleasing to the eye. As the text said, “ugly” is the most subjective classification, so I think it is up to the individual whether or not they find this particular visualization ugly. My favorite aspect of the visualization is how simple it is graphically, while still conveying a lot of data. Particularly, the ability to hover over certain parts of the visualization to display more data helps to convey a lot while not overwhelming the viewer.

Enoch

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It’s a scatter plot that shows a teams power raking broken down by their offensive and defensive efficiency
Bad
While this visualization is effective in showing differences between teams offensive and defensive rankings, the actual power rankings can be difficult to pick out.

Emily Gunderson

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Every time you click the page, the visualization gives a timeline of the current day and how it relates to the current month, current year, and all the way to Earth’s existence. Then it gives us information on when living things started to exist, such as fish and birds. At the end, it showed us how the existence of Earth relates to when the universe was born.
Good, Ugly
I liked how it showed the timeline of fish and birds underneath the life of Earth. I also liked how it explained what each phase was every time you clicked the page. I did like the colors, but I wonder if it could be just a little more aesthetically pleasing. On just one of the phases, a meteor shower was created as part of the background, with I am not sure was necessary. I also wonder if a different chart could have been used, or if this was the best one for displaying this timeline.

Collin Lilienthal

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This visualization is showing the amount of perceived corruption in countries worldwide. This is displayed on a color-coded world map. Using the legend bar on the bottom of the visual, you can highlight countries based on what corruption bracket they fall into.
Good
This visualization is very easy to comprehend, is aesthetically pleasing, and as far as I can tell, it isn’t incorrect in its data. The world map format is easily the best part of this visualization. The worst part is the color palate. A more radical color scheme would potentially improve it.

Gapminder

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It visualizes many economic data and it’s pretty cool.
Good
It conbines Bubbles to better visualize the data.

Math W82 Visualize This! with D3 January 2020

Example Visualizations

Math W82
Visualize This! with D3
January 2020