Homework 4: Visualizing Data with Many Eyes

Assigned: Oct 6, 2011
Due: Oct 13, 2011 in class

Description

The purpose of this assignment is to give you exposure to the Many Eyes visualization system, its visualization generation pipeline, and the visualization techniques it provides. We will use a dataset about results from the Tour de France bicycle race. You should create different visualizations in Many Eyes to help you understand and analyze that data.

More specifically, you should answer the questions:

• How has the average speed of the winner changed over the years?
• Why?
• What country had the most occurrences of its riders finishing first and second in the same year? How many times was that?
• How have different countries dominated the Tour and how has this changed over time?

Data Set

Tour de France results - http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/tour-de-france-results/versions/1

Note

When you create a visualization, don't store it on the Many Eyes site and thus give it away to your other class colleagues. You can create visualizations without logging in as a registered user and saving the visualization.

Also, do not look at the previously-created visualizations of the data as it may limit your creativity.

Submission

For each question, turn in your answer and a screenshot of the visualization(s) you created to answer the question. At the end, provide a critique of Many Eyes, its strengths and limitations. This should just be a few paragraphs.

Grading

I will evaluate the quality of your answers and how you used the visualizations to help address these questions. I will evaluate the thoughtfulness of your critique.

Based on homework from John Stasko, Georgia Tech