MAT 259 - 2011W



Patrick Rudolph | Hot Topics 2005 - 2010


Description

The first project tries to find correlations between real world events and the number of books checked-out at the Seattle Public Library. I picked five topics and visualized the "hotness" (number of check-outs) in 3-week steps with various kinds of plots. The topics/keywords are "Bush", "Obama", "Financial Crisis", "Global Warming" and "Apple". For easier understanding it is possible to move the mouse over one of the topics to see which real world events influenced the data. Additionally its possible to toggle between different background colors and graph styles at the top right corner.

In order to aquire the data, I just extracted the number of check-outs for every single day of the years 2005 to 2010 from the database and saved them to a text file. Due to performance reasons, this whole step of optaining the data has been done previous to the execution of the main program. During runtime the text files are loaded and the data is compressed to three weeks. All these files can be found within the data folder of the source code.

This project was realized using Processing.

Project #1 source code


Project Evolution

Initial doodle of the visualization.


Final visualization in default mode.


Final visualization as a bar chart with the frequency as the brightness of the bar.


Final visualization as a line graph with blue background.




Source code: project1 Topic