| Handed out: | October 30, 2020 |
| Due date: | November 8, 2020 (before 11:59:59.99 PM) |
The purpose of this proposal is to develop a concrete plan for your final project. Your deliverable is a proposal that describes in fairly specific terms what you wish to accomplish in your project and how you intend to do so. Another important aspect of this assignment consists in deciding whether you will be working on your project by yourself or collaborate with another student.
The final project represents a significant portion of your overall grade in this class and you will be dedicating to it the remainder of the semester. As such, it is important that you devise a well thought-out roadmap for your work. If you are still unsure about what such a project could be, you can refer to the links that I posted on Piazza to final projects that were completed at several universities in other data visualization courses.
The first piece of information that you must provide is whether your intend to collaborate with another student on this project or work on it alone. In the former case, identify both students that will be collaborating. Note that in the case of a collaboration, it is fine for both students to submit a single proposal. The decision to collaborate on a project should be duly motivated and in particular your project objectives should reflect the fact that two students will be contributing.
Your proposal must include a description of the dataset(s) that you will be visualizing. You should only consider for your project datasets that are either your own or that you can easily and freely access online. In the latter case, you should include in your proposal the URL of the data source. You should also make every effort to download the data before submitting your proposal. This is to avoid any unforeseen issues with the data availability that could negatively impact your project timeline.
Another important question that you must address is whether you will need to perform any data preprocessing or data cleaning for your project. Real world datasets are often incomplete, or they contain erroneous or invalid values that must be removed before the data can be visualized or otherwise analyzed. Include in your proposal an assessment of the work that will be necessary before you can start your visualization project in earnest.
If you have yet to select a dataset for your project, I encourage you to check out the various sites that I listed on Piazza as potential sources of interesting datasets covering a wide range of topics.
Once you have identified your dataset, you must articulate an objective for your visualization project. What problem will you try to solve? What question do you want to answer? What particular insight do you hope to gain through your visualization? etc... You may want to refer to Chapter 3 of the textbook to refresh your memory about the various kinds of high level objectives for a visualization. Your proposal must clearly state the goal of your project and explain how that goal relates to the data you chose. That information in turn will be used to assess your results.
Once you have clearly identified the objective of your project, you should be in a position to propose your visualization solution. Describe its user interface and its main functionalities. Explain what a typical use scenario for your visualization would be. Include sketches to give a better sense of what you have in mind. Mention which software you will be using for the implementation of the project and indicate whether you plan to reuse some of the code that you already wrote this semester.
Provide a tentative timeline for the completion of your project: What will be the main milestones and when do you foresee reaching them? Comment on the dependency constraints that exist between the various pieces of your work. If you chose to work on this project in a team, clearly state what the specific contribution of each student will be.
As a reminder, you will have the next 4 weeks (November 2 - November 30) to complete your project, which will be followed by a presentation during dead week. You will be submitting a (short) progress report after 2 weeks to indicate what portions of your planned work you will have completed by then, what potential difficulties you encountered, and what changes you decided to make as a result. This progress report is intended to ensure that you remain on track for a successful and timely completion of your final project and to give you the chance to make any necessary adjustments.
Submit your proposal on Brightspace before November 8, 2020 at midnight. Submit a text document (PDF or Word) addressing all the points listed above.