Ananke - The Need of Finding Context for Data

"The great fun of information visualization, is that it gives you answers to questions you didn't know you had." - Ben Shneiderman

By @carnby (Eduardo Graells Garrido) for the EU Hackathon Hack 4 Transparency, or #H4T.

My project is based on the idea that visualization should support decision making. In this context, whoever makes a decision, such as politicians in the European Parliament, has a low probability to be a visualization expert. Thus, I believe that visualizations should use simple techniques and emphasize exploration and interactivity instead of question answering.

Considering those principles, I was able to design three visualizations:

• Prototype Visualization: Map View - parallel maps to compare indicators between countries in Europe.
• Idea/Mockup: Internet Quality Dashboard.
• Idea/Mockup: Real Events (inversely?) Correlated with Internet Quality Measures.

Please note: you need a modern, standards compliant browser.

All visualizations use a wide screen (1440x900) because they are intended for high resolution screens in a shared space by a group of people. The idea is that different persons can see the visualizations and interact with them.

The visualizations are browser based because I want to encourage access, storage and sharing.

Credits

• Django Project: I have used django's model structure to store and query aggregated data from M-Lab.
• d3.js: I have used this library to create the mock-ups (visualizations 2 and 3) and the interactive visualization (vis. 1).
• Data Sources: M-Lab, The World Bank. The SVG Map of Europe comes from Wikipedia.

Last Updated: November 10th, 2011.