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VAST: A Tale of Alderwood

A Tale of Alderwood: Visualizing Relationships in a Diverse Data Collection (.pdf)

* This work was later continued and entered into the 2006 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Contest, where it won first place in the Student Category. An accompanying paper was also published in the ACM Digital Library. The date is January of 2003 and the location is the fictitious city of Alderwood, Washington. Suspicious activity is occurring in Alderwood, although officials are not sure exactly what is going on. While it is possible that political scams are corrupting the city, Alderwood is also being plagued by other issues such as economic problems resulting from the dot com crash. Rumors also report that the city is suffering from cases of Mad Cow Disease. What is really going on in Alderwood? The 2006 VAST contest, sponsored by the IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, describes the above scenario with Alderwood. The task is to hypothesize about what events are occurring in the town of Alderwood and provide visual evidence for these events. The contest data consists of over 1000 news stories, 2 maps, a phone call log from the Alderwood City Hall, several photographs, news articles, a voter registry, and scientific reports. For this project, our team decided to tackle a problem more concrete than the task described in the contest. We chose to create a visualization that would clearly represent relationships within the varied data set. Our visualization uniquely combines various classic information visualization techniques, allowing users a powerful way to interact with the visualization. The components of the visualization complement each other, so users are able to combine information from various components and thus draw interesting conclusions about the data set that would have otherwise been difficult to see. I was responsible for a majority of the GUI programming and the coding for the interaction with the visualization. This work included connecting the components of the visualization to the backend framework and wiring up the interaction so that any interaction by the user prompted changes in the appropriate elements of the visualization.

Teammates: Sheena Lewis, Summer Adams, and Kanupriya Singhal 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.