Michael Thornbrugh, Zach Zastrow, Sam Sudekum, Lei Wang and Chinmay Ratnaparkhi
May 1, 2016
The timeline view that we created was the view that we created to be our "core" view. From this view you are able to select people from the left and to display their timelines. It is then from that timeline that you are able to navigate to our other views which will let you research other aspects of the person you are looking at.
The bubble view is the next best thing in historical data visualization. This view takes a very basic model for anything historical (who, what, when and where) and is able to expand that into a web of other information. We essentially would compare this view to something like the Youtube autoplay feature.
When you select an event you are then given some options that are in some way related to the event that is currently in focus. You are then able to look into those events which will repeat the process in a never ending loop (If you so choose). You are also able to go back to the timeline view to restart this view or you can navigate to the map view to get a different perspective.
Our map view was created because we wanted a way to show events in a different light. There are many different pieces of software that are already on the market that allow you to view dates and events easily, but we wanted a way to see how some of the locations for events coorelate. If you were for instance looking at an event that happened in Lawrence, Kansas you may want to look to see if there are any other events that also happened around that area.
This view also allowed us to take a person that we are interested in and see how their lives played out over time. Through the use of the date filters in the bottom right you can choose a time frame that you would like to look at and the view will adjust to those times.
For our project we created a backend for our product that stores the historical events. It is hosted through Heroku and has a PostgreSQL database. This allows for anyone to edit and upkeep the information for our project.
Later on down the road we have plans to not only improve upon the performance of the project, but to also make it easier for everyone to use. We plan on eventually allowing for alternative database sets to be used as opposed to only allowing our own. This will be done through either a typical .csv file or other similarly formatted file that we will then ask for upon the start of the software. We also plan on improving how the bubble view selects similar events.