As I haven’t posted on the blog for some time, I thought it would be useful to provide an update on progress over the past month or so, plus a preview of what I’m hoping to work on over the next few months.

Over the past few weeks I’ve written and submitted a paper to The International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications. The contents of the paper follows the flow of most of my recent blog posts. Firstly, it covers the use of exploratory data visualizations in order to help make sense of large datasets. It then goes on to look at refining the data visualization process and considering the granularity of the data being presented. The final sections of the paper discuss the use of visual analytics – combining data visualization and statistical analysis, within the decision making process.

The next step for me is to look into designing and creating an application that will allow (for example) curriculum designers to view the complexity of the data available to them, as well as showing the potential impact of making alterations to seemingly small and insignificant areas of the curriculum.

As I’ve shown in earlier posts, there’s a lot of data to visualize – if you print some of the network graphs on A0 paper you can only just about make out which node represents which module, for example. As a result of this, I’d imagine that one of the main focuses of the next few weeks is finding visualization techniques and tools that will allow a lot of data to be shown to the user, but in such a way that it’s still a usable application.

As usual, I’ll be attempting to post regularly to document what I’ve been doing.