Today, I had a quick mentoring with Joelle Bitton, Antonio Scarponi and Björn Franke. Main questions of mine were the feasibility concerning the whole project and how I should structure my process in a most efficient way. I was worried about the complexity of the project itself and felt that a clear timetable and a few hours contemplating about it could help extremely to structure everything. Also, starting with diving into the actual making can resolve that feeling.
So, after the mentoring,I started off with a quick research of how these data visualizations can be done and found out that Processing might not be able to handle those huge data sets. So I had a look into the different libraries and possibilities of d3s.js and talked to other students who have been using this tool. After that I went rapidly into pretotyping.
I decided to build a small simulation of a space, which is basically a very simple grid that works as a room or the ceiling of a room. I laser cutted 5 example countries and hung them with a string from the wooden sticks above.The size of these wooden tiles used for the countries is refering to their actual size mapped onto the space available in the used room. The edges are defined by the number of letters of the country and the height indicates the current value of the data. In this example case, population is displayed and the higher the country hangs, the more people are living in it. Switzerland as a starting point and our actual position is indicated with a different string and is placed according to the actual distances to the other countries.
Main findings of this pretotype
- not strongly refering to linguistics or the topic
- european-centred view is not unbiased and should be avoided. other solution is needed!
- it is not preceivable for the viewer, which country he is looking at
- conveying the message of geocollocations is not working
Improvements
- find another metaphor
- improve linguistical perception
- change data set?
Timetable set-up
In the evening, I took the time to set up a timetable for the whole project in order to structure it better. What has to be done is to structure and define the further proceedings precisely.
