CMP 161 -- Winter 2012

CMP 161 -- Programming Assignment 2

Due date:
Midnight, FRI, 3/9/2012

DRAFT: check back for updates

Objective:

Learn about information visualization techniques by analyzing a data set with D3.

To Do:

This assignment is based on the IEEE InfoVis 2007 Contest.
Information and access to the data set is available here.
Be sure to attend the lab sections to learn how to make the data readable by D3. Additional info also available here .
Your task is to create visualizations that will answer the following contest questions about the data set:
- Is there a correlation between box-office winners and Oscar winners in various categories? Which categories show a strong positive or negative correlation?
- What are the most "bankable" actors, actresses, directors or cinematographers? I.e., which of the above tend to generate strong box-office performance?
- Do "winning" groups on movie sets tend to work together?
Note: question 1 (Do Best Actress Oscar winners tend to come from certain genres?) will be covered in the lab section.
As in the contest: The questions answered and how they were answered should be demonstrated in the submitted documentation which accounts for 50% of this program's grade.

Documentation (50 %)

Documentation for EACH question should include:

Discussion of specific question, any assumptions about the data or context, what visualization technique was chosen and why (i.e. design choice for visualization).
Discussion of the visualization results and how they answer (or don't answer) the question at hand.
Discussion about any additional insights that you might learned while trying to answer the specific question, if any.
Discussion about challenges/difficulty in getting effective visualizations that explains the answers.
This technical report should be about 500-1000 words per question.

Supporting Materials (50 %)

This includes images and animations. Pay attention to the innovativeness of your designs. Discuss these aspects in the documentation requirement above.

Bonus (up to 10 %)

Possible bonus points can come from

Additional questions answered -- points will depend on complexity or ``surprise'' discovery factor of results.
Extensions to D3 to realize a particular visualization design that you wanted to generate. Again, points will depend on complexity of extensions.

Items To Submit:

A folder or directory called prog2
Include a file called prog2.html with documentation and images/animations of your program. Include your name and login ID near the top of the page. Make sure all your links are all local and relative to your prog2 submit directory.
Include results (images and animations) for each question, as well as the documentation about each one. One of these images should be named "thumb.gif" and will be used as a thumbnail to index into your submission.
Put all of these items into a folder called: prog2; tar or zip it up before submitting.

Again, note that all these should be local e.g. relative to your submit directory.

Grading:

This program nominally accounts for 10% of your final grade. Programs turned in at least a full day early will earn 1% bonus credit. Late programs will be charged 1% late points. In addition, late programs will not be accepted 24 hours past due date. Late programs and reports will not be accepted for the final project. The bonus credits may be accumulated up to a total of 50% toward program and final project credits. This program is graded 50% for documentation and 50% for supporting materials. Additional points may also be earned for extra features/insights.

Submission:

Submission must be done using the submit utility from CATS (e.g. unix.ic.ucsc.edu).

submit cmps161-ap.w12 prog2 prog2.tar, or
submit cmps161-ap.w12 prog2 prog2.zip,