Final Project Topic Ideas
Data Analysis/Explainer
Newspaper Navigator
The Newspaper Navigator is a Library of Congress dataset that extracts the visual content of historic newspaper pages. They apply crowdsourcing and machine learning techniques to identify photographs, illustrations, maps, comics, cartoons, headlines and advertisements. Design an interactive explainer to let people explore different aspects of this data set.
Data source: https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/
Why is my flight delayed? Investigating Flight Delays & Cancellations
Flight delays are estimated to have cost air travelers billions of dollars. FAA/Nextor estimated the annual costs of delays (direct cost to airlines and passengers, lost demand, and indirect costs) in 2017 to be $26.6 billion. With external dataset, you can try to uncover the correlation between flight delays and factors like weather. Using the geological information, you can also identify and visualize the geological pattern of the flight delays. Investigate the common causes or potential pattern of the delays and present the insights you find with visualization.
Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/usdot/flight-delays#flights.csv
Other data sources
As noted in Assignment 2, there are a variety of data sources available online. Here are some possible sources to consider for a data analysis/explainer project.
- Data is Plural - Variety of datasets and sources covering many topics.
- Stanford Institutional Research & Decision Support - Stanford institutional data (e.g. enrollment, admissions, diversity, etc.).
- Stanford Open Data Portal - Stanford Daily’s open data sets.
- Big Local News Data Archive - Stanford Journalism’s Big Local News Project data sets.
- data.gov - U.S. Government open datasets.
- U.S. Census Bureau - Census data.
- Federal Elections Commission - Campaign finance and expenditures.
- Federal Aviation Administration - FAA data.
- Awesome Public Datasets - Variety of public datasets.
- Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer - We have recently released a tool that can be used to analyze who and what appears in the last decade of Cable TV News (i.e. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC). The site lets you download data as well which you could use to conduct further analysis.
Research Projects
Visualizing rhyme structure in musical lyrics
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article visualizing the rhyme patterns in the lyrics of the songs from Hamilton. They have described their process for creating the visualization on this webpage and in a published article. The goal of this project is to apply this analysis process to other musical lyrics – can be from musicals, rap songs, etc. – and automate the analysis as much as possible.
Investigating the genres and the design space of videos explainers
For the lecture on Visual Explainers we read Segel and Heer’s 2010 paper describing genres of narrative visualization in the context of print and the Web. We also have seen examples of video explainers such as those from chart party and 3brown1blue. The goal of this project is to analyze such video explainers and identify genre conventions as well as the design space of such videos. For example, the chart party videos use a variety of camera moves (pans, zooms and 3D persepctive) and annotations to provide an overview of large charts and focus viewers on specific aspects of it. Identifying all such techniques for focusing viewers is one example of messaging in such videos and part of the overall design space.
Cartograms
Cartograms are maps that scale the area of a region to reflect some other data (e.g. population). As noted by the cartogram central website, cartographers have developed many different types of cartograms. We are beginning to see algorithms capable of generating some types of cartograms. Many of the algorithms use optimization techniques to design a cartogram that maintains a particular set of constraints. One project in this area is to develop a new algorithm for creating cartograms. The project could focus on identifying a particular set of constraints that are important for creating a particular type of cartogram and then implementing the constraints using standard optimization techniques. For example, you might develop an algorithm for producing Dorling cartograms.
