Motivating questions
The main question that I sought to answer in this visualization is .What are the
important lessons that I have learned in life?. There are many times when I come
to some profound realization while doing some task and think to myself, .I hope
I remember this for the rest of my life.. The sad thing is that I probably don.t
remember half the things about which I have said that. Through the compilation
of the dataset for this project, and by creating a visualization of the data, I
was able to gather the lessons I have learned throughout life and present them
in a visually significant way. This project has enabled me to navigate through
the lessons I have learned, organized both temporally and spatially, and it
will hopefully help me to remember them for the rest of my life.
The Dataset
My data takes the form of a CSV file of all the lessons I have learned in life.
Over the course of a month, I compiled these lessons by memory by systematically
thinking through what I have learned through the years, using old journals,
emails, photos, and conversations with friends to jog my memory. The actual
database which I compiled over the past month is significantly bigger, but I
have chosen the subset of lessons which I would not mind sharing with the
public, with many of the names of my acquaintances changed to protect their
identities. Each row represents one lesson learned. This database recorded
several properties about each lesson learned:
1) Category (Career, Education, Family, Friendship, Happiness, Love,
Self-Improvement, and Travel)
2) Teacher (who I learned the lesson from) . many of the names are disguised to
protect the identities of my acquaintances
3) Date (when I learned the lesson)
4) Location (where I learned the lesson)
5) Importance (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most important)
6) Summary (a summary of the lesson in <80 characters)
7) Details (a more detailed description of the situation/lesson)
Design Decisions
There were two main visualizations of the main dataset for my project, one where
the lessons are organized in a chronological manner, and one in which they are
sorted by the location where I learned the lesson.
I chose a simple, sleek design for the time line because there is much data to
be represented in very limited space. Each view of this visualization displays
one year in my life and the lessons learned in that year. Users can navigate
though years with the left and right arrows shown at either end of the time
line. For each month in the year, I have a stack of circles under the month,
color-coded by the category of the lesson, each representing the lessons that I
learned in that month. The sizes of the circles vary according to the importance
of the lesson, and all the lessons in each month are also sorted in descending
order of importance. To select the most appropriate colors for this
visualization, I chose the eight colors for the category color-coding through
ColorBrewer. Mousing over a circle in this screen shows a shout-out box
containing the summary of the lesson. Clicking on the circle would causes the
gray display box at the lower right corner of the screen to display the details
of that particular lesson.
The second visualization is one of a map of the world, with a circle of variable
size marking every unique place where I have learned a lesson/lessons. The size
of the circle correlates, to an extent, to how many lessons I have learned in
that place. I set a maximum size on the circle because I learned a
disproportionately high number of lessons in certain locations, such as
Cambridge MA. Mousing over one of these markers shows the name of the location
and the number of lessons that I learned in that place. I can then click on the
circle to display a pie chart in the upper right corner of the screen that shows
the division of those lessons into the eight categories. I chose to use a simple
gray scale map of the world so as not to distract from the main point of the
visualizations, which are the lessons (represented in lime green, which stands
out nicely) rather than the various countries of the world. I considered making
each of the small circles a pie chart, but the circles were too small in
relation to the large world map for that level of detail.
Future Considerations
If I had more time, I would love to add some features to my project. To the
Timeline view, I would add a zoomed out view of my entire life's timeline at the
bottom, so that I could see trends, at least in the number of lessons learned at
any given time, through my whole life. It would be great if I could navigate to
a particular time segment by clicking on a portion of this bar, as well. To the
World Map view, I would improve the features associated with clicking on each
circle. I tried but could not figure out how to cluster together the slices of
the pie chart that had the same color (category), so right now they are randomly
ordered according to the order of the original data. I would also like to be
able to click on a segment of the pie and display the details of that particular
lesson in the gray box on the lower right corner, but I could not figure out how
to detect mouseclicks within those slivers of a circle.