December 16, 2022

ARTG5330: Visualization Technologies

This assignment for my Visualization Technologies class finally gave me the kick I needed to start cataloging all the chocolate bars I’ve tried. I was able to both find sufficient information and recall my opinion on 144 craft chocolate bars. I wanted to find out for myself if there were any correlations between how much I liked the bar and the type (dark, milk, white), price, and company.

The benefit of using data that I collect myself is that the data was clean, all the attributes I needed were there, and it was easy to filter or adjust. The (huge) downside was that there was virtually no way to automate entering data on over 100 chocolate bars. Caveat: data is heavily biased because I purchased every bar. So of course they’re all things I thought I would like.

I chose a scatterplot to visualize my chocolate bar ratings because I wanted to allow tooltips on each bar; it is important to me, the primary user of this visualization, to know exactly which bars from which makers had very good or very bad rankings. Is there a pattern? I am also a relatively new D3 user. Scatterplots are relatively easy to implement and would allow the on-click portion of the assignment to be switching axes.

Frustrations: Although D3 syntax mirrors many vector editors, I have very little Javascript experience. Issues such as, “where does JS require a comma versus a semicolon?” and general order of operations required considerable additional research. My primary takeaway from working with a relatively new medium in a class oriented more towards tech skills than design skills is that the concept and design stage should take roughly 75% of total effort. (Data cleaning should also be part of that 75%.) A clear vision for this project helped me quickly hone in on the technologies I wanted to implement and spend more time de-bugging rather than agonizing over the particulars of the chart. It is easy to feel useless in comparison to professional software engineers, but this class was a pleasant reminder that good design can be implemented with basic coding knowledge!