Presentation

Below is the brief for the presentation. I was pleasantly surprised that most of my post for my final idea was relevant for my presentation. I went through each of the topics presentations had to contain and made sure my presentation matched each of these. We had to use a style of presentation called a 'petchcucha' which is a short format which uses 20 slides which are each shown for 20 seconds. So I had to come up with 20 images for my presentation, of course this initially proved difficult. 

Of course I already have images from my final ideas and artwork I have discussed in my readme. I had also started working on designs for my visualisation so these were included as well. All the images I chose, were strong images that would trigger what I was meant to be talking about. I also looked at of how my project matches the brief. Another thing I wanted to put it my presentation was quotes from my readme, my whole idea for this project is based around my readme. So it plays a huge part in developing this project.

1: Title
2: Project Summary: A project title and a 100-word summary of the project.
3: Development: A description the ideas behind your project, and how this development drew on the concepts in your readme.
4: Plan of Work: Production Timetable: A plan of work and time scale for developing and completing the project.
5: Output: the actual or anticipated outcome of the project, and an assessment of its relationship to the chosen theme and relevance to discussions regarding art and technology, in relation to both critical theory and practice.
6: Criteria: How the project matches up to the module assessment criteria.
7: References: Useful references to help contextualise your project.
8: Visual Material: A range of support material, diagrams, images, etc.

Below is a copy of my presentation.

Final idea

My project will look at different types of data visualisations and determent, which is more popular. It will take data from a Facebook group called ‘Information Aesthetics’ which is linked to blog where people post links to their visualisations they have made. I will determine which visualisation are the most popular by how many likes, comments and shares each of them have. I will display the information I have found in three different visualisation. 

 I wanted to use this blog called Information Aesthetics to find out which visualisation when the most popular. However when I looked at the RSS feed there was no information regarding how many people have commented on the posts. Once I found this out I had a dilemma of what to do next, my whole project was based around finding out which visualisations were the most popular and how was I meant to do that without the necessary information. 

  

This led me on to looking at their Facebook the group. In this group they share visualisations from their blog and people can comment, share as like these posts. In a way using Facebook as a way to gather my information is better because more people have access to the information and it gives a more wider range of people. It was also good because I can extract the data I need,  I can get how many likes, comments and shares have taken place on one posts. This is exactly the information I need to create my visualisation.

  

 I will use Facebook's graph API explorer to be able to extract the data I need. As you can see from the image below it gives you all the data from the post including how many likes a post has, for example this post has four likes. 

 

In my ReadMe I talked about 3 different kinds of visualisation. Scientific visualisation where it is a very basic form, such as graphs and charts. This is a visualisation from a book called 'Discovering statistics using SPSS' by Fields. This is a very simple data flow diagram, this is an example of a scientific visualisation because it is very easy to read.  Of course it is not very pretty to look. 

 

The middle visualisation is where there is an equal balance between pictures and information. This type of visualisation  is the most popular in today's society. We see this a lot in our day-to-day lives, such as the news, the weather, maps and to show trends .This is an example of a visualisation that appeared in any article wrote by Mosher, called 'Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps' which was published in Wired Science magazines. 

 The artistic visualisation is where there is no data available, it is just a picture.  Looking at these visualisations it is a very hard to see what data is being represented without being told. This is a piece of artwork by Chris Harrison, it shows all the cross-references within the Bible. 

 

Each of these visualisation have pros and cons, and different types of people prefer different types of visualisation. so I decided to create my visualisation in 3 different formats, therefore catering to everybody's needs.  I will also add ability to be choose which visualisation people like the best, therefore determining which visualisation is ultimately the most popular. All of the visualisations will be interactive, when you click on one of them it will take you to the post about that particular visualisation. So not only do the post show you which are the most popular it also allows you to explore the data be used.

Research and ideas

The inspiration for my project came from my Read Me. I discussed the fact that there are three different types of visualisation. I knew I would be creating a visualisation for my project. So I look into documentation surrounding data visualisation. I found a quote by David McCandless (2010) which states "There's something almost quite magical about visual information it effortless it literally pouring in and if your navigating a dense information jungle coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualisation it's a relief, it's like a clearing in the jungle". I wanted to create a visualisation that has this effect on people. I want people to look at my project and think its a breath of fresh air.

One of the things I noticed about visualisations is that there are so many different one out there. How will people know what to look at? How will I get them to look at my visualisation rather then someone else's. I decided that it would not be possible to just create a normal visualisation, I want to make something that it is truer to my read me.   

I decided that I wanted to look at existing work, that pull different visualisation together in one place. One example I found was blog titled Information aesthetics, this pulls in different visualisation and displays them as different posts. 

 

Timetable

The first thing I decided, I wanted to do was to create a timetable for this project. So I knew exactly what had to be done and how long I had to do it. This would stop me having to do it all last-minute. There are 9 different sections to this project one of these is idea development. The duration of this task will be  8 days long, I will have to form a solid idea of what I would like to do for my project and start to think about how I will undertake this.


Then I will work on my presentation development. I will make my presentation in PowerPoint,  which will include all my research and my explanation of my final project.  I will also included visual aids to help get my idea across. I allowed myself 6 days to put the presentation together and a further 3 days for the presentation run through. I want to make sure I knew exactly what to talk about in my presentation.


Once I have got a concrete idea and have done to the presentation I will then start to work on the design for the project. this is an important part of my project, I want my project to be aesthetically pleasing. I have allowed 5 days for the designs of my project.


Once I have undertaken all of the research and planning I will then start my coding development. This is when I will actually create my project. From experience it is quietly easy to encounter issues during this process, for example a piece of code does not work and you spent maybe 3 hours trying to work out why that is, this can be very long process. So I wanted leave myself a substantial amount of time to actually get my project working, so I left myself 12 days to do this.  I also wanted to make sure I tested my program to make sure that there were no bugs.  so I will leave 6 days to get the project fully tested.


While I am creating my project I will also be development of documentation. I will be updating this blog to document my working progress, my thoughts and my ideas. This will be a ongoing thing throughout the project, but will mainly take place when the development of my project starts.


 I have to create a webpage for my project and documentation to be hosted on. The URL of this page is what will get uploaded and marked. I want to create a custom page based around my project, this will host the final project, a link to my blog, my readme essay and the appendix about my project. I have given myself 11 days to put together and finish this webpage.


 The last step I will undertake will be proofreading all of my documentation. I want make sure everything I write makes sense and is relevant. I have given myself 3 days to proof read all of my work, I will also get a second person to proof read it as well. Then on 1 May I will  submit my URL which is my final project. I worked out that these 9 steps would take me roughly 51 days.


This is an image of my final Gantt chart which shows the tasks i'm undertaking and how long they would take me to complete.