Due March 4 CS 4460/7450 - Information Visualization Spring 2010

Homework 3: Building a Visualization

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with experience in implementing an interactive information visualization. You should visualize the data set that you chose to use in HW 2. Also, you should use the visualization design that you created in HW 2 as the basis for your visualization. You are not locked into that precise design, however. It is OK to modify it somewhat as you see fit. In some cases, your design may have been too complex to implement in the time available for this assignment. In other cases, you may think of variations on the design and you proceed with your implementation. Let us know what influenced the final form that your visualization takes.

You can choose any graphics library, programming language, and/or visualization toolkit to support your implementation. Clearly, the toolkits demonstrated in class would be good choices. Different toolkits have different strengths, however, so make your choice carefully. Also, your prior experience working with languages and toolkits clearly will be an influence.

What to turn in: You should use t-square to submit your assignment. You should bundle your code in a zip file along with a short document that describes your system and how it works. If your visualization lives on the web and can be run through a web browser, tell us that and give us a pointer to the URL.

Grading: We will grade the assignment based on the quality of the interactive visualization you produce. Does it read in the data set and actually work? Is it an effective representation of different aspects of the data? How thorough is the visualization? We do, of course, understand that different students come to this class with different levels of programming experience. That will be factored into our grading.