Hi! My name is Alex and I’m a member of eyeData, a Digital Problem Solving Initiative project working on creating a data visualization tool to integrate with Dataverse, the largest collection of research data led by Mercè Crosas of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Vito D’Orazio. The rest of the team is four undergraduates at Harvard College, as well as a more senior member assisting us all the way from the U.K.

Getting started with the project, we gathered to discuss the scope of the project and the direction that we wanted to take the project in. It turns out that there are rudimentary tools existing already, for example Princeton University has a tool called Roper that can generate tables and graphs for the survey results it includes in its database. Similarly, Dataverse already has a feature called TwoRavens that leverages metadata attached to the data sets in order to create graphs with some user interactivity built in. Knowing that some of these features exist, we will take these into account as we meet again next week to discuss our task for the week.

Our task was for each individual to identify some interesting features or graphs that they would like to see implemented in the project. Since we are using d3.js, I’m sure many of us turned to the d3.js github for inspiration, although there are certainly many striking visualizations online to inspire us.

As this is only our first week and we haven’t dived into the programming, nothing has been challenging thus far. But we are all excited to dive into the code and learn! Many of us have prior experience with R, Javascript, and d3.js, the main technologies we will be building with, but this project will require us to expand our knowledge bases of those languages, which I’m sure will be a challenging, though rewarding experience.

Best,

Alex Wang