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— | project:peaks [2016/11/28 05:24] (current) – created raphael | ||
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+ | ===== Peaks – Map of Swiss mountain names ===== | ||
+ | **Live site:** https:// | ||
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+ | Peaks is a visualization that explores the origin of mountain names in Switzerland. Visitors can explore the map and interact with the data through the filters on the right. At the bottom, there are three guided narratives. The piece is best experienced in a modern desktop browser. If it doesn’t display properly, [[https:// | ||
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+ | === Exploring the data and finding the story === | ||
+ | The underlying data is an amazing set of numerous georeferenced names of built infrastructure and topographical features. To make sense of this big dataset (a 50MB plain text file with 224,369 lines), I had to build custom Node.js tools to filter, analyze, and convert the data into more understandable and manageable forms. | ||
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+ | During this data exploration phase, I came across countless threads of stories that could potentially be told, and eventually settled on the rich intersection of mountains and languages. | ||
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+ | === Visual representation and rapid iteration === | ||
+ | To get first basic visual representations, | ||
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+ | While building these visual tools to experience the data, it became clear that I wanted to provide them to visitors for self-guided exploration. In addition, I discovered interesting sub-stories that I wanted to pull out as narratives and make them accessible to an audience that isn’t familiar with the data. | ||
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+ | === Turning interesting into insightful === | ||
+ | The first narrative explores the impact language has on naming (e.g. Romansh' | ||
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+ | The step from an interesting data visualization to meaningful information design often requires enriching the core dataset with additional datasets (e.g. census data) to put it in context. | ||
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+ | === Polish, polish, polish === | ||
+ | All user interface elements started out as standard web-components and then turned into custom forms to work in harmony with the rest. The mountain-themed language checkboxes, for example, double as map color key and language toggles. I did all interface and layout design iterations in Sketch before coding them up. | ||
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+ | To give a sense of orientation, | ||
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+ | I grew up appreciating the [[http:// | ||
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+ | I turned the color palate into four distinct single-hue sequences that can also depict altitude (from darker and more saturated colors to lighter tints for snowy high-altitude peaks). | ||
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+ | ===== Data ===== | ||
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+ | * [[https:// | ||
+ | * [[https:// | ||
+ | * [[https:// | ||
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+ | ===== Team ===== | ||
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+ | * [[user: | ||
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+ | {{tag> | ||