UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles - Users - UCLA

4.1. Virtual Process: Data and Tools
Data In his PhD dissertation, Computational Information Design, Ben
Fry proposed seven stages of information visualization in order to make
his process accessible to a wider audience; “a tool is introduced to simplify
the computational process for beginners and can be used as a sketching
platform by more advanced users.” 56 For my thesis project, the first
influential idea concerning this process is the possibility and flexibility to
visualize data as on my own; this led me to the topic I chose for my thesis
project. However, as I stated above, my project is not visualizing data as a
screen-based representation, but as a physical kinetic information
visualization/installation.
For this project, I started with Fry’s stages to explore and manage my
dataset, and the stages that he proposed are as follows:
[A]cquire–Parse–Filter–Mine–Represent–Refine–Interact 57
Figure 37. Initial idea sketches
for rainfall and tide dataset.
1. acquire: the matter of obtaining the data, whether from a file on a disk
or from a source over a network.
2. parse: providing some structure around what the data means, ordering
it into categories.
3. filter: removing all but the data of interest.
4. mine: the application of methods from statistics or data mining, as a
way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context.
5. represent: determination of a simple representation, whether the data
takes one of many shapes such as a bar graph, list, or tree.
6. refine: improvements to the basic representation to make it clearer and
more visually engaging.
7. interact: the addition of methods for manipulating the data or
controlling what features are visible.
In my project, I followed 6 stages from ‘acquire’ to ‘refine’. Before
starting the first step, I took an additional step – analyzing datasets to
check the suitability of my project. I needed a dataset that is updating in
real time and is generally from a location. Although my project is not
56
Fry, Ben. “Computational Information design.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 2004
57
Fry, “Computational Information design.”, 2004
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