Campus 100 ~ Data Visualization Project

myweb.students.wwu.edu/~jamese4/dsgn457/dataVisualization/Campus100.html

My personal contribution to the project:

• collected data from offices in Old Main
• logo and grid of 100 people image
• actionscript navigation
• individual stat movie clips in flash

Data Visualization Comps

INITIAL COMPS:

home page:

secondary page:

compare page:

#2 home page:

secondary page:

REVISED COMPS:

FINAL COMP:

Data Visualization – process

HOME

• Categories
  1. Characteristics
     • Gender
     • Ethnicity
     • Place of Origin
     • Residency Status
     • Disability
     • School satisfaction
  2. Lifestyle
     • Housing
     • Meal plans
     • Working on campus
     • Use parking pass
  3. Academics
     • Year in school
     • Major
     • GPA
     • Graduation and job placement
     • Application info and retention
  4. Activities
     • Athletics
     • AS club membership
  5. Campus Services
     • Heath Center
     • Tutoring Center
     • Counseling Center
• Utilities
  • Search
  • Change School
  • Compare

• About

Pic of the final organization of our stats… we wrote all the data we collected on post it notes and organized them into categories:

Data Visualization Proposal

Project Title – 100 People

Project Overview – We plan on collecting statistics on Western Washington University students and presenting the data as if Western’s community were shrunk down to 100 people. For example, Western’s students are 55% female and 45% male, so the group of 100 people would be represented as 55 women and 45 men. This application would include statistics from several different departments on campus as well as a visual representation of a weekly poll that would gather data about student preferences that are not a part of Western’s record (ie religion, political leaning). Though our project will only show information about WWU, the idea would be that this app could be expanded to include stats on other major universities and allow comparisons between them.

Project Goal – The goal of our project is both to consolidate and clarify school statistics. Most of the information we would include already exists somewhere in Western’s public records, but all of these statistics are found in different locations. Our app would allow the user access to all of these statistics at once. Also, by presenting this information at a smaller scale, a group of 100 rather than thousands, we believe the information will be more clear and have more of an impact to users. People would have a much easier time comprehending statistics based on a group of 100 rather than looking at large numbers and percentages.

Audience:

This application would most like appeal to several specific groups:

- Prospective Students: High school students debating where to apply for college could use this application as a way to learn more about the demographics and student life at different schools, extending beyond the broad descriptions provided in university brochures and application packets. They might be particularly interested in the feature that allows users to compare statistics between two or more colleges simultaneously.

- Marketing & Journalism Students: These students would use this application to find credible university statistics for articles they might be writing for the Western Front, or projects they might be doing for class. It would provide a single location where these students can look up a wide variety of statistics, rather than needing to contact staff in multiple departments.

- Associated Students Employees (students & faculty): AS employees are constantly looking for ways to improve on-campus activities, and this application would provide them with hard data to base quarterly decisions on. It could also serve as justification for the administration to increase or cut funding to certain AS programs.

- University staff: By staff we’re referring to on-campus market managers, dining services staff, health center employees, etc. These groups of people could use this app to to make decisions about what to sell, what hours to stay open, how many new employees to hire, etc.

- University Administration: This group is hugely concerned with money and how to best divide up funding. Administrators are also interested in how to attract as many incoming students as possible to Western. Stats on this regularly updated app could provide the administration with a quick reference for both funding decisions and promoting the university.

Data Collection & Organization:

We will be collecting the majority of our statistics directly from a selection of departments, programs and services across campus. Some student stats are also available online through Western’s web site. After obtaining a sufficient amount of data, we plan to categorize it by source (department, program or service). Example categories may include: Housing, Financial Aid or Athletics. Some categories may only contain one statistic, while others will likely contain multiple. Theoretically, all of the content would be generated from a university-maintained database that could be updated regularly.

Data Visualization Brainstorming

Idea 1 -  Corporate Ownership

The relationships between brands and the corporations that own them can be very confusing. This interactive app would show the hierarchy of corporate conglomerates and provide information about the mega corporations that own the brands that we are most familiar with.

Here are a few examples of charts that show these types of relationships:

Idea 2 – Google Stats

Another idea we had was to visually represent statistics pulled from google about people’s search preferences.

Here is some inspiration for this idea:

http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/wordspectrum/index.html

http://xkcd.com/522/

http://xkcd.com/458/

http://xkcd.com/369/

Idea 3 – If Western were 100 people…

This idea was generated from this infographic:

Basically, we would use the same concept only take statistics from WWU. We could compare things like major, financial aid recipients, age, gender, race, GPA, place of origin, religion, drug/alcohol use, living arrangements ect.

Our other three ideas can be found on Kim’s Cargo page at this link:

http://cargocollective.com/gladow#212699/Data-Visualization