| Handed out: | October 26, 2020 |
| Due date: | November 2, 2020 (before 11:59:59.99 PM) |
In this fifth (and final) assignment, you will use a commercial data visualization tool to recreate some of the visualizations that you implemented in previous assignments. This assignment is not focused on programming. The objective here consists in understanding the benefits and limitations of a widely used visualization software, and in particular to compare it to open source visualization libraries both in terms of ease of use and flexibility. Practically, you will use Tableau, either in its Public version, or the standard commercial one, to create two interactive online visualizations. Note that you have only 7 days to complete this project.
Tableau is a sophisticated visualization platform that is primarily geared towards the data analytics needs of the business community. It was initially developed as the commercial version of a research tool named Polaris created by Chris Stolte during his PhD at Stanford. For the purpose of the present project, you will be using the Public version of Tableau, which gives you free access to the functionalities of the commercial product and allows you to create visualizations that are then stored and publicly available online on the Tableau data server. Alternatively, you may be able to obtain the commercial version of Tableau via iTaP.
There are many video tutorials available online that showcase the various features of Tableau and provide detailed instructions to use them. Navigating this material to learn how to create the visualizations described below constitutes, arguably, the bulk of the work for this assignment. A good place to start this journey is Tableau's resource page.
For the first task, I am asking you to create a bubble chart visualization of the country factbook dataset that you used in Assignment 2. Your visualization should only consist of a single bubble chart, with "GDP per capita" mapped to the x coordinate, the life expectancy mapped to y, the population size mapped to area, and the continent mapped to color. Note that the file that I am providing you for this assignment contains the continent information, which was not available in the original file. No brushing or linking features are needed.
The second task consists in visualizing the graph dataset US Air 97 that you considered in Assignment 3. Specifically, you should visualize the graph in its geospatial layout (primarily continental United States) and plot the edges as straight lines. Similar to what you did for Task 3 of Assignment 3, the thickness and saturation of the edge representation should be used to encode the weight/value of the edges. You do not need to visually encode the importance factor of each airport, in contrast to what was asked in Assignment 3. Similarly, no interactive filtering mechanism is required.
Your final task in this project is to comment on your experience with Tableau. In particular, you should discuss the learning curve of this tool and compare it to that of the visualization library that you have used so far this semester. You should also give your opinion about the quality of the visualizations you were able to create with Tableau and indicate how this visual quality compares to your prior results. Final point: discuss the flexibility that you found in Tableau to achieve a specific result.
Submit your solution for this project on Brightspace before November 2, 2020 at midnight. Refer to the instructions below.
<myLogin>_p5, where
<myLogin> is your Purdue login.