MSAN 622
Information Visualization

Homework 4

By Monica Meyer

See Code

Tableau Dashboard

Functionality

Basic

  • There is a link to the Tableau dashboard which includes 3 separate panels, demonstrating 3 techniques

Moderate

  • The prototype is implemented in D3
  • The D3 version uses the same techniques and most of the same variables, with a small amount of changes
  • The variables used for the scatterplot are different for clarity

Advanced

  • When a category bar is clicked, it filters all three graphs. The scatterplot only shows dots from that category and the small multiples chart shows only the area chart for the category clicked on
  • When a dot in the scatterplot is clicked on, the same actions as above occur
  • For both filters, the small multiples chart is filtered so that all categories but the one clicked on are hidden and the area chart for that genre is shown at full size so the user can see the trend over time in more detail

Interactivity Guide

Click on a bar to filter out other categories in both the scatterplot and small multiples area chart. Click on a dot in the scatterplot to filter so that you can only see data for the genre of the dot in both the bar chart and small multiples area chart

Data Preprocessing

For the area chart and bar chart, I aggregated the data to a time series summing the total movies for each genre. I also removed the genres of short and animation so that I could visualize the five major movie genres. For the scatterplot, I removed movies with budgets above $3 million dollars to see length vs. rating of low-budget movies.

Discussion

For this dashboard, I chose to visualize different aspects of the data by genre. Originally, with the Tableau dashboard, I chose to color by mpaa rating, but due to the format of the data, I decided to color by genre. When plotting the scatterplot, there were far too many data points to be able to see anything meaningful in the data. Instead, I subset the data so that I could emphasize only low budget films.

The interactivity I chose to implement illustrates the differences between the genres. It allows the user to interact with the data without being distracting.