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Visualizing Time-Oriented Data

Visualization Description

This resume visualization highlights the development of my skills throughout my academic and career experiences. Skills are listed in the green rows across the top of the visualization, with relevant coursework along with corresponding projects and specific work experiences on the sides. The timeline on the left displays the years of my undergraduate as well as graduate years. Also, the graduation dates for both academic degrees are denoted on the timeline. The timeline displays more recent dates towards the top, which emphasizes current activities. In addition, the timeline is not drawn to scale, which allows it to highlight points in time with more relevant activities than other times. Furthermore, my contact information and objective are at the top of the visualization. The main feature of this visualization is the technical skills and experience section. Each of my skills is listed across the top, with a bar below indicating the progression of this skill through time and in relation to my various academic and work experiences. Each bar has one or more dots in it, representing the various periods of them where I have applied that skill, whether it was in a specific class, for a specific project, or at a specific job. As time progresses downward, the lowest dot in a bar indicates when I first acquired a skill. Each of these dots is connected via a horizontal line to the corresponding project, course, or job in which a skill was applied. The bars are also color coded, varying in color intensity along a shade of blue. This variance maps to my expertise in that skill; an older skill that I have applied frequently in my academic and work careers will have a corresponding bar with many variances in intensity, whereas a newly acquired skill will have a corresponding bar with few variances in intensity. When a skill is applied, the color of the bar at that point in time (represented by the black dot) becomes more intense. Thus, my stronger skills will have more intense colors.

Tasks Supported

For the most part, job recruiters looking at resumes are interested in learning about a person’s academic and career experiences and how these have helped a candidate to acquire and develop skills useful towards the position he/she is applying for. This important realization inspired the idea behind my visualization. This visualization is effective in communicating the development of skills across time. One can preattentively determine which skills are newer than others, and which ones are more developed, expert skills (based on the intensity changes in the bar for that skill and the number of dots in the bar). It is also easy to distinguish whether a skill was applied in a course, a project, or a job. Since the present is at the top of the timeline, one can read across the bars and determine from the color intensity of the bars how skilled a person currently is in various areas. Likewise, following the vertical lines connecting the dots shows the context in which a person has applied each skill with respect to specific courses, projects, and jobs. These tasks are achieved easily with this visual representation of a resume as opposed to a more traditional, textual representation. Moreover, the tasks supported by this visualization are useful in helping others to learn about a person’s background, experience, and skill expertise without much effort.

Reflection

Although this visualization allows for a range of tasks to be accomplished, it also has areas for improvement. First of all, the approach used does not scale very well. While this visualization is effective in representing a resume, it runs into significant space issues when representing the resume of a person with many skills and a much longer history of relevant projects, courses, and work experiences. Also, the visualization does not display more detailed information such as publications, interests, other personal information, and descriptions of projects/courses/jobs. For skills applied numerous times, it becomes difficult to distinguish the variances in color intensity in the individual bars. Despite these limitations, this visualization is quite useful for being a static visualization and successfully allows people to accomplish the tasks noted above.

CS 7450 (Information Visualization) is a graduate level, seminar-style course aimed at educating students in information visualization principles, existing information visualization techniques/systems, and how to critique/evaluate visualizations and techniques in light of various tasks. With this focus, the course intends to provide students with knowledge that will promote the design of new, innovative visualizations.