Data Portraits
An interactive data visualization summaries my writing journey since 2013.
Data Portraits is an interactive map visualizes my 6-year writings while I was living, working or traveling in 20 countries. Writing has been the foremost way for me to document my journey, share my thoughts and express my feelings. In this piece, I analyzed the texts and visualized them based on the data of time, content and word counts.
You could manipulate the dashboard to control what features are visible. The timeline and the circles represent when, where and what I wrote since 2013. The particle system represents the most frequent words appeared on my texts. For me, these texts embody the memory helped me to document my personal growth, and the people I love. They are part of me, they are me.
I am thrilled to use data visualization and technology to review part of my life. You may interact with the map here.
How to read this piece
Each circle represents each article. The circle on the map means the article has been written in this specific location. Here are some features on this interactive map.
Process
Concept Design
Here are the questions I asked myself before I started making it -
What would be the most interactive way to display the key messages through data visualization?
What variables of data I want to use and why?
How do I want to visualize those data and ? e.g. shape, size, color.
Technical Preview
The process to visualize the writing data entails four steps.
Acquire writing texts as the original data. These data sets are not structured. It contains date, location, text body, and dialogues.
Structure the data and order it into categories on the basis of format, tags, date, location, and some text bodies, then filter out the data that is unnecessary for data analysis and visualization but keep the data of interest.
Convert filtered data into variables denoting values that need to display through visualization. In this case, word counts denotes radius, date denotes color, keywords denotes the quantities of the particles.
Design a dashboard that users will be able to manipulate the data and control what features are visible.
Interaction Design
“Overview first, zoom and filter, than details-on-demand”
by Ben Schneiderman’s information -seeking mantra, one of the most common navigation behavioral patterns in data viz.
Navigation
On the interactive map, users will be able to zoom in and out to frame the view to see the circle represents each different articles written in different locations.
Manipulation I
On the dashboard and the map, users will be able to manipulate the timeline and hover the circles to see when, where and what the articles have been written.
Manipulation II
Users could click on the button to see the most frequent words appear on the texts, which will give them an initial insight about the keynotes of the articles.
Learning
It is important to build environments focus on consistent and meaningful transitions among views that offer users a comprehensive insights through the visualization, rather than just build a dashboard.
Create a dialogue between multiple visualization is the key to tell a powerful story. It is highly possible for users to get useful insights from a consistent user journey than a broken one.