benSchweitzer.org

Wishing everyone a happy festive season and a great start into the new year!

My vacation schedule is pretty busy – thus not many updates – but I’m enjoying myself and recharging some energy for the next semester (hopefully).

After two weeks of intense work on the project, I had my final review this past Friday and I am mostly happy with the result. I have not been able to implement quite everything I would’ve liked too, but main functionality is there. For everyone who wants to see the result (may take a little while to load):

Illinois Population Statistics Visualization (1000×720 Java Applet)

The code is pretty messy right now with very little commenting, but any feedback is welcome (whether on the code or the final product, links to the code are on the applet page).

The two main things that I initially planned on adding but didn’t have enough time for are: 1. animation when navigation between different elements and 2. Graphs for the counties that allow to better compare individual populations for a given county.

I’m not sure whether I will move on to adding those two as other projects may take priority, but it has been a very educational experience. In a later post I will probably get a little bit more into the challenges I encountered, but for now I’m happy to present a working version!

I recently came across this little info graphic and while it does a decent job at getting the relationship between the different drugs across, it is butt-ugly and doesn’t tell you much about individual drugs. Since I’m somewhat interested in the topic, redoing that graphic might be an interesting new project.

Wow, school and work have just totally taken over this past week and they won’t let up until this Wednesday. Expect a more thorough update after that, but until then this will have to do.

After getting all my preliminary work done, I’ve now started coding the actual project and have been more or less successful so far. I got the map to load and was able to address individual counties without a problem. Even doing a rollover for counties didn’t pose too much of a challenge although it was a great learning experience as I used a buffer which I had never before. This Hack was extremely helpful along the way.

As I was coding the project I came up with the idea of having the maps rotate of the screen in 3D whenever the user changes the map. However one problem I seem to run into is that when load my SVG map into a 3D environment using PShape, and then try to use disableStyle() on it, I keep getting an Exception. I tried to work around that by shuffling in between different PGraphics objects but haven’t been able to work it out yet. Since the due date is approaching, I may have to go with a different solution.

Next: I now have to decide exactly how to implement the visualization for all the statistics. This step is turning out be slightly more complex than I had anticipated. I was playing around with visualizing the population per sqm, and quickly ran into the problem that the lowest value is 11 and the highest way up there in the 1000s, but the average across the stare is very low. This had the effect of totally distorting my color scale and left me with a unicolored Illinois, save for the Chicago area. Accordingly I will be fine-tuning each of the statistics. This will take some extra time but shouldn’t be too complicated. After I get that done, I will start implementing more interactivity and also start printing the first maps (I’m gonna have fun with the fonts on this one as PFont is bitmap based and I can already foresee a few resolution problems coming my way).

In my next post I will be proving some first visual results as well as post some more of my code.