What We Worked On

This week, we actually got started coding. Our friends at IQSS set us up with a server and website (http://eyedata.datascience.iq.harvard.edu/). We all set up our personal environments and are working off a git repo. We use Jenkins to integrate our changes nightly.

With our midterm presentation this week, we then decided to split up the project and each of us (Batsheva, Luis, and myself) would develop an area and integrate them for the presentation. Luis is working on the UI; Batsheva is processing the data; I am using d3.js to create visuals.

What Went Well

So far it’s all has been going quite well! We were able to lay out the architecture of the website clearly and divide up the work evenly. We are on track to have a very basic version this week.

What Was Challenging

Setting up the environment for Windows was challenging. I eventually just resorted to setting it up on a VM running Ubuntu.

For me personally, it has be challenging to navigate the various technologies that we are using. Most of what we are using, such as Django and d3.js, are new to me, so a lot of time is spent just learning the language and principles behind them. Luis and Batsheva have previous experience with their modules, but regardless it takes a nontrivial amount of time to work through. Once these fundamentals have been laid out, we’ll have a barebones version of the website that will use some datasets living in the git repo to generate some visuals!

What’s Up Next

Currently, we are all working on our individual parts in order to have something to present at the midterm presentations this Wednesday. Our goal is to have a basic mockup of the UI that we envision, a processed data set, and a visualization created from that dataset. If you’re in the area, feel free to stop by and check us out!

After this week, we’ll probably hook up our website with the Dataverse search API, polish the UI, and automate the creation of the d3.js graphs. Once we have the website’s functionality up and running, we’ll all transition to creating graphs for different types of data.

Until next week,

Alex