Final Project: Interactive Transit Map

The final project is a "Flashifying" of a transit map of the vicinity of the Springfield Mall. It was an interesting project, as I essentially adapted a map I'd made at work for the Flash format and added interactivity. There's an instructions button in the file, so I'll say nothing more.

Lab 10: A Monocameral View of the Giants' Season

For the final lab of the term, I chose to "camerify" my map of the Giants' season. The camera zooms to each game they played during the 2007-2008 season and hesitates for a second or two before moving on to the next game. I've also included pause and play buttons for........wait for it.......pausing and playing the animation.

Getting Tufte with Aesthetics and Data Density

Aesthetics

Tufte discusses ways to design maps with aesthetic concerns not only for how the map can be made to look nicer, but how aesthetics can be combined with the information being presented in the data to make a more effective map.

A clear order is established for the effectiveness of prose, tables, and graphics. In addition, there is discussion about how prose or tables can be made with some sort of graphic quality, such as the "data graphic" showing predictions versus actual numbers with words but in a graphic format. Tufte explains that data and graphics often compete against each other but should actually be used together to convey information. Words, though, should tell the viewer how to read the design of a graphic more than they should tell the user what to read from them.

Tufte also engages in a pretty intense discussion of the elements of the "friendly data graphic", in particular the manner in which serif fonts should be used (upper and lowercase letters), line widths should not all be the same, and graphics should favor a horizontal orientation.

He also seems quite pleased with himself on more than one occasion.


Data Density

Maps are just phenomenal at showing large amounts of data in a small space. Example after example of how we can see smaller and smaller things than the reader might have thought possible at first. Sadly, Tufte doesn't do much discussion of whether the user can actually interpret the information rather than just see it, but that's ok, because he's the expert.

Graphics with lots of information are better than graphics with little information, because graphic devoid of information leave the viewer questioning why there is so little information shown and what information has been left out. Fortunately, most graphics can be shrunk considerably thanks to the Shrink Principle, which states that "graphics can be shrunk way down."

He still seems quite pleased with himself.

Lab 9: Satellite Imagery of Hyrule

Lab 9 is an exciting exercise in preloading and moving from flash file to flash file. For the exercise, I continued the theme of last week's exercise, this time including some maps from earlier games in the Zelda series.

Lab 8: The Hero of Hyrule

Lab 8 demonstrates panning and zooming capabilities possible within Flash. The map is the Dark World map from the classic SNES game, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The buttons were created in Illustrator and the scripting was provided by the instructor, so once a few issues were ironed out, the task wasn't too difficult.

Map of Interest #...I Forget

This week's map of interest is a map created by by Soon-Hyung Yook, Hawoong Jeong, and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at the University of Notre Dame as part of their research in the network structure of the Internet.

It illustrates that there is really not much correlation between density of routers in an area and density of population. On the other hand, it does show that where there are lots of routers, there are lots of people. The color scheme is effective, as the darker and redder colors show where the densities are highest. The map probably could have used some country boundaries, though, to help illustrate exactly which countries have the densest populations and the most routers. Additionally, the map's "projection" is geographic, which really means that it is unprojected. An equal area projection would have been more suitable for this kind of map as density calculations are based upon area.

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