BeerViz: Are You Thirsty??

Beer Visualization beer chord layout

Our objective was to create a fun way for users to explore beer varieties. The data set was taken from BeerAdvocate (http://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-BeerAdvocate.html), a comprehensive collection of 10 years worth of user reviews on beer.

We wanted to ensure that the multi-dimensionality of our data was showcased through our visualization and so we opted to create a chord layout. The narrative begins by asking users to select their preferred beer strength, and uses this input to generate a chord that showcases similarities between beers based on reviewer ratings. Users can further explore similarities across the parameters of appearance, taste, aroma and overall ratings. These similarities are depicted by connected chords. Beerviz shows you the most reviewed types of beer and allows you the explore the relationships between them. Additionally, the size of the nodes represent the popularity (defined by number of user reviews) of the beer that they represent. Hovering over a node highlights the relationships. Beers are clustered based on the styles. These styles are represented with various colors.

Once a user has explored and discovered beers he wants to try, he can also look at the summary charts that provide a summary of the entire dataset. Our summary charts showcase the following key statistics:

  • Average ratings for each of the parameters (aroma, taste and appearance) by type of beer (depicted by the beer colors).
  • Popularity of the various kinds of beer based on the number of reviews
  • The top 5 beer styles for dark, medium and light beers

From our own explorations of the visualization we have found some interesting beers like Raging Bitch, Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout and Hopstoopid that we plan to try out. We hope that users enjoy using our visualization to explore and discover beer.

Here is a link to our visualizations: http://seekshreyas.github.io/beerviz/#

Team: Divya Anand, Evie Phan, Sonali Sharma, Shreyas

Storytelling Lab: The Divergence of Economic Fortunes

classactivity

Team: Evie Phan, Aksel Olsen, Jacob Portnoff, Aude Hofleitner, Divya Anand

We toyed with several iterations on the increasing disparities in income and taxation levels during the past 30 years, but it doesn’t  seem to us that the main source of rising inequality was the rising wealth of the top 1 percent per se. We liked the chart showing how average salaries since 1970 had been relatively stagnant while productivity had grown substantially. The wealth of Americans, it seemed, had become unhitched from the great successes of corporate America during the past few decades of globalization.

With this as a point of departure, we came up with the scale as a succinct metaphor for the divergence of economic fortunes. The idea is to split the population in two groups; the 99 percent (other) and the 1 percent (wealthy) and show a scale balancing different economic distributions. The first one would just compare count of people; the second the income share to each “group”, the third the share of taxes. For each variable, the scales would
balance in different ways. To be fair, we would include the share of the federal income tax which would tip the scale in the other direction, as the top 1 percent paid a full 28% of the Federal
Tax Liabilities for All Households.

We would implement this as an interactive visualization with two variable features:

(1) a time slider, allowing the user to see change over time, and

(2) an equalizer, allowing the user to see how the two groups would need to change in size to give an equal balance

On the right hand side, we would have linked decorations/charts, enhancing the main core of the story though additional and relevant details.

The target audience is the general public.

Adding to the subject of color blindness…

The first portion of the article talks about why some primates evolve to see different colors (3 dimensions of color).

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One theory is that that primates evolve to distinguish fruit colors on trees. However, this article suggests that primates evolve to see different colors to sense emotions. For this reason, primates that can see 3 dimensional colors have no fur on their faces, etc. Blood color changes depending on the amount of oxygen present and so the color vision is sensitive to that color.

The second half of the article is about how the theory is used to come up with glasses for color blind people.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/how-mark-changizi-conquered-colorblindness-glasses