Thursday, February 5, 2009
2/5/09
Obituary Data Visualization Project Proposal
Download pdf here
Abstract
“Obituaries De Stijl” is a data visualization graph with a neoplasticism feel to be displayed on a computer. Since this type of style was Dutch artistic movement, the obituaries that are plotted on this graph are of different type of designers, including web, architects, fashion, etc. It would display the deaths throughout the year.
Overview
Given: Having full access to the Legacy.com database from the past 15 years.
Legacy.com is an innovative online media company that collaborates with more than 700 newspapers in North America, Europe and Australia to provide ways for readers to express condolences and share remembrances of loved ones.
Being in a school with many design talents, having a data visualization system that shows the deaths of designers would be rather interesting.
The system itself would look similar to a piece of artwork from the neoplasticism movement (a grid like composition with solid colors). Each of the solid colors would represent a different sub category of design. The De Stijl artworks would usually be limited to the primary colors, white and black, but since there are way more design disciplines than 5, there will be more colors to this graph. The disciplines include web, communication, graphic, motion, production, fashion, architectural, game, and other. There are an exceptional amount of other design disciplines and to determine which ones make it to the top 8 will be analyzed through out time.
The larger the solid, the more deaths it represents. Each solid color have a hover feature stating which design discipline it’s representing and how many deaths. Once the solid is clicked, the Mondrianesque graph will animate smoothly to show another De Stijl type graph, illustrating the ages of the deaths. The color of the solids would no longer be variant, but would be different shades of the color that was clicked. A lighter shade would represent a younger age, while the darkest shade represents an old age.
The data will be scraped from the Legacy.com database by means of a web scraping program (Beautiful Soup library made on for the Python language). Once the data is obtained, another program will be written to visually display the information in the De Stijl style. Flash will be used to animate from main graph to subgraphs.
Scenario
Initial graph displaying different design disciplines. Cursor is hovered over Web Designers.
Sub graph displaying specific discipline and number of deaths.
Resources
1. Graphic Visualization of Male Deaths
http://www.schneiderism.com/the-graphic-visualization-of-death-for-men/
2. Interactive Chart: Your Risk of Death
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/interactive-cha.html
3. Death by Cause
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/revisualizing-y.html
4. Effects of Blogs
http://www.gridplane.com/html/projects/data-vis
5. Fresh Information Graphs
http://designyoutrust.com/2008/12/06/fresh-information-graphics/
6. Very Small Array (Music)
http://www.verysmallarray.com/
7. Stock Market and World GDP Data Sculpture
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/01/world_gdp_statistical_data_sculpture.html
8. Piet Mondrian
http://www.pietmondrian.org/
9. Map of the Market
http://www.bewitched.com/marketmap.html
10. Mondrian Visualization
http://rosuda.org/mondrian/
1 comments:
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Steve - You need to lay out your arguments as to why the design is interesting. The abstract should be used to give somebody a concise explanation of your project.
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