Hello there, Alex from eyeData with an update on our progress.

Unfortunately due to a miscommunications, our advisers weren’t in town and we were not able to meet with them.

However, we have still been hard at work. This week, we have been hard at work building our design doc, which Luis mentioned in our blog post last week. This design doc describes our overall goals and implementation strategies for our final product. The doc encompasses our discussion so far on UI and other aspects of the final product and was a good exercise in scoping out a project and defining milestones, deadlines, technical writing, etc. Furthermore, it was a good exercise in collaborating and dividing up work so that all of us can meaningfully contribute.

Without further ado, and since for the most part ya’ll don’t have access to our doc, here is a description of our vision of our basic product. We want to create a standalone website. Users will be able to search for datasets on Dataverse, using the Dataverse API, and then select whichever options they want. They will then be taken to a dashboard where they will be able to select which type of visualization they want. Our most basic goals are handling one dataset and basic graphs, such as bar graphs, scatter plots, time graphs, etc. But our broader vision is to allow users to choose multiple datasets and interact with their variables, as well as create more visually striking and meaningful graphs. Check out the Github page for d3.js and let us know your favorites!

Next week, we will actually get our hands dirty coding and developing! We also need to discuss how the work will be split up. Our friend from last week, Raman, will help us set up a server and the necessary tools. We may need to work through some tutorials to familiarize ourselves with the languages we’re using.

Until next week!

Alex Wang (College ’17)