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CSE 6242 / CX 4242: Data and Visual Analytics HW 2: Tableau, D3 Graphs, and Visualization
“Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you have” – Ben Schneiderman Download the HW2 Skeleton before you begin
Homework Overview
Data visualization is an integral part of exploratory analysis and communicating key insights. This homework focuses on exploring and creating data visualizations using two of the most popular tools in the field; Tableau and D3.js. All 5 questions use data on the same topic to highlight the uses and strengths of different types of visualizations. The data comes from BoardGameGeek and includes games’ ratings, popularity, and metadata. Below are some terms you will often see in the questions: • Rating – a value from 0 to 10 given to each game. BoardGameGeek calculates a game’s overall rating in different ways including Average and Bayes, so make sure you are using the correct rating called for in a question. A higher rating is better than a lower rating. • Rank – the overall rank of a boardgame from 1 to n, with ranks closer to 1 being better and n being the total number of games. The rank may be for all games or for a subgroup of games such as abstract games or family games. The maximum possible score for this homework is 100 points. Students have the option to complete any 90 points’ worth of work to receive 100% (equivalent to 15 course total grade points) for this assignment. They can earn more than 100% if they submit additional work. For example, a student scoring 100 points will receive 111% for the assignment (equivalent to 16.67 course total grade points, as shown on Canvas). Download the HW2 Skeleton before you begin ……………………………………………………………………………….. 1
Homework Overview …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Important Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2 Submission Notes ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2 Do I need to use the specific version of the software listed?………………………………………………………………. 2 Q1 [25 points] Designing a good table. Visualizing data with Tableau. ………………………………………………… 3 Important Points about Developing with D3 in Questions 2–5 ……………………………………………………………. 7 Q2 [15 points] Force-directed graph layout……………………………………………………………………………………… 8 Q3 [15 points] Line Charts……………………………………………………………………………………………………………10 Q4 [20 points] Interactive Visualization…………………………………………………………………………………………..14 Q5 [25 points] Choropleth Map of Board Game Ratings……………………………………………………………………18 2 Version 0
Important Notes A. Submit your work by the due date on the course schedule. a. Every assignment has a generous 48-hour grace period, allowing students to address unexpected minor issues without facing penalties. You may use it without asking. b. Before the grace period expires, you may resubmit as many times as needed. c. TA assistance is not guaranteed during the grace period. d. Submissions during the grace period will display as “late” but will not incur a penalty. e. We will not accept any submissions executed after the grace period ends. B. Always use the most up-to-date assignment (version number at the bottom right of this document). The latest version will be listed in Ed Discussion. C. You may discuss ideas with other students at the “whiteboard” level (e.g., how cross-validation works, use HashMap instead of array) and review any relevant materials online. However, each student must write up and submit the student’s own answers. D. All incidents of suspected dishonesty, plagiarism, or violations of the Georgia Tech Honor Code will be subject to the institute’s Academic Integrity procedures, directly handled by the Office of Student Integrity (OSI). Consequences can be severe, e.g., academic probation or dismissal, a 0 grade for assignments concerned, and prohibition from withdrawing from the class. Submission Notes A. All questions are graded on the Gradescope platform, accessible through Canvas. a. Question 1 will be manually graded after the final HW due date and Grace Period. b. Questions 2-5 are auto graded at the time of submission. B. We will not accept submissions anywhere else outside of Gradescope. C. Submit all required files as specified in each question. Make sure they are named correctly. D. You may upload your code periodically to Gradescope to obtain feedback on your code. There are no hidden test cases. The score you see on Gradescope is what you will receive. E. You must not use Gradescope as the primary way to test your code. It provides only a few test cases and error messages may not be as informative as local debuggers. Iteratively develop and test your code locally, write more test cases, and follow good coding practices. Use Gradescope mainly as a “final” check. F. Gradescope cannot run code that contains syntax errors. If you get the “The autograder failed to execute correctly” error, verify: a. The code is free of syntax errors (by running locally) b. All methods have been implemented c. The correct file was submitted with the correct name d. No extra packages or files were imported G. When many students use Gradescope simultaneously, it may slow down or fail. It can become even slower as the deadline approaches. You are responsible for submitting your work on time. H. Each submission and its score will be recorded and saved by Gradescope. By default, your last submission is used for grading. To use a different submission, you MUST “activate” it (click the “Submission History” button at the bottom toolbar, then “Activate”). Do I need to use the specific version of the software listed? Under each question, you will see a set of technologies with specific versions – this is what is installed on the autograder and what it will run your code with. Thus, installing those specific versions on your computer to complete the question is highly recommended. You may be able to complete the question with different versions installed locally, but you are responsible for determining the compatibility of your code. We will not award points for code that works locally but not on the autograder. 3 Version 0 Q1 [25 points] Designing a good table. Visualizing data with Tableau. Goal Design a table, a grouped bar chart, and a stacked bar chart with filters in Tableau. Technology Tableau Desktop Deliverables Gradescope: After selecting HW2 – Q1, click Submit Images. You will be taken to a list of questions for your assignment. Click Select Images and submit the following four PNG images under the corresponding questions: ● table.png: Image/screenshot of the table in Q1.1 ● grouped_barchart.png: Image of the chart in Q1.2 ● stacked_barchart_1.png: Image of the chart in Q1.3 after filtering data for Max.Players = 2 ● stacked_barchart_2.png: Image of the chart in Q1.3 after filtering data for Max.Players = 4 a Q1 will be manually graded after the grace period. Setting Up Tableau Install and activate Tableau Desktop by following “HW2 Instructions” on Canvas. The product activation key is for your use in this course only. Do not share the key with anyone. If you already have Tableau Desktop installed on your machine, you may use this key to reactivate it. a If you do not have access to a Mac or Windows machine, use the 14-day trial version of Tableau Online: 1. Visit https://www.tableau.com/trial/tableau-online 2. Enter your information (name, email, GT details, etc.) 3. You will then receive an email to access your Tableau Online site 4. Go to your site and create a workbook a If neither of the above methods work, use Tableau for Students. Follow the link and select “Get Tableau For Free”. You should be able to receive an activation key which offers you a one-year use of Tableau Desktop at no cost by providing a valid Georgia Tech email. Connecting to Data 1. It is optional to use Tableau for Q1.1. Otherwise, complete all parts using a single Tableau workbook. 2. Q1 will require connecting Tableau to two different data sources. You can connect to multiple data sources within one workbook by following the directions here. 3. For Q1.1 and Q1.2: a. Open Tableau and connect to a data source. Choose To a File – Text file. Select the popular_board_game.csv file from the skeleton. b. Click on the graph area at the bottom section next to “Data Source” to create worksheets. 4. For Q1.3: a. You will need a data.world account to access the data for Q1.3. Add a new data source by clicking on Data – New Data Source. b. When connecting to a data source, choose To a Server – Web Data Connector. c. Enter this URL to connect to the data.world data set on board games. You may be prompted to log in to data-world and authorize Tableau. If you haven’t used data.world before, you will be required to create an account by clicking “Join Now”. Do not edit the provided SQL query. a NOTE: If you cannot connect to data-world, you can use the provided csv files for Q1 in the skeleton. The provided csv files are identical to those hosted online and can be loaded directly into Tableau. a d. Click the graph area at the bottom section to create another worksheet, and Tableau will automatically create a data extract. 4 Version 0 Table and Chart Design 1. [5 points] Good table design. Visualize the data contained in popular_board_game.csv as a data table (known as a text table in Tableau). In this part (Q1.1), you can use any tool (e.g., Excel, HTML, Pandas, Tableau) to create the table. We are interested in grouping popular games into “support solo” (min player = 1) and “not support solo” (min player > 1). Your table should clearly communicate information about these two groups simultaneously. For each group (Solo Supported, Solo Not Supported), show: a a. Total number of games in each category (fighting, economic, …) b. In each category, the game with the highest number of ratings. If more than one game has the same (highest) number of ratings, pick the game you prefer. NOTE: Level of Detail expressions may be useful if you use Tableau. c. Average rating of games in each category (use simple average), rounded to 2 decimal places. d. Average playtime of games in each category, rounded to 2 decimal places. e. In the bottom left corner below your table, include your GT username (In Tableau, this can be done by including a caption when exporting an image of a worksheet or by adding a text box to a dashboard. If you use Tableau, refer to the tutorial here). f. Save the table as table.png. (If you use Tableau, go to Worksheet/Dashboard Export Image). NOTE: Do not take screenshots in Tableau since your image must have high resolution. You can take a screenshot If you use HTML, Pandas, etc. a Your learning goal here is to practice good table design, which is not strongly dependent on the tool that you use. Thus, we do not require that you use Tableau in this part. You may decide the most meaningful column names, the number of columns, and the column order. You are not limited to only the techniques described in the lecture. For OMS students, the lecture video on this topic is Week 4 – Fixing Common Visualization Issues – Fixing Bar Charts, Line Charts. For campus students, review lecture slides 42 and 43. 2. [10 points] Grouped bar chart. Visualize popular_board_game.csv as a grouped bar chart in Tableau. Your chart should display game category (e.g., fighting, economic,…) along the horizontal axis and game count along the vertical axis. Show game playtime (e.g., <=30, (30, 60]) for each category. NOTE: Do not differentiate between “support solo” and “non-support solo” for this question. a. a a. Design a vertically grouped bar chart. For each category, show the game count for each playtime. b. Include clearly labeled axes, a clear chart title, and a legend. c. In the bottom left corner of your image, include your GT username.NOTE: In Tableau, this can be done by including a caption when exporting an image of a worksheet or by adding a text box to a dashboard. Refer to the tutorial here. d. Save the chart as grouped_barchart.png (go to Worksheet/Dashboard Export Image. a. NOTE: Do not take screenshots in Tableau since your image must have high resolution. The main goal here is for you to get familiarized with Tableau. Thus, we kept this open-ended, so you can practice making design decisions. We will accept most designs. We show one possible design in Figure 1.2, based on the tutorial from Tableau. 3. [10 points] Stacked bar chart. Visualize the data.world dataset (or games_detailed_info_filtered.csv if using the local files in the skeleton) as a stacked bar chart. Showcase the count of games in different categories and the relationship between game categories, their mechanics, and max player size. a a. Create a Worksheet with a stacked bar chart that shows game counts for each playing mechanic (sub-bars) for each game category. NOTE: This data contains duplicate rows, as each row represents a distinct game. Do not remove duplicate rows from the data. b. Display game counts along the vertical axis and category along the horizontal axis. c. Include clear axes labels, a clear chart title, and a legend. d. Create a Dashboard using the worksheet you created. 5 Version 0 e. Add a filter for the number of ‘Max.Players’ allowed in each game. Update the chart using this filter to generate the following chart images (Refer to the tutorial here on how to add a filter in a dashboard. Make sure to add ‘Max.Players’ in the filter shelf in the Worksheet first, like this): i. Select “2 Players” only in the filter. Save the resulting chart as ‘stacked_barchart_1.png’ ii. Select “4 Players” only in the filter. Save the resulting chart as ‘stacked_barchart_2.png’ iii. Both images must include your GT username in the bottom left. This can be added using a text box. Refer to the tutorial here.https://youtu.be/fRwQenvBJ6I iv. In each image, the filter must be visible. If you are using Tableau Online, you may need to add your worksheet containing the chart to a dashboard and then download an image of the dashboard that contains both the filter and the chart. Note: To save a dashboard image, go to Dashboard – Export Image. Do not submit screenshots. An example of a possible design is shown in Figure 1.3. Optional Reading: The effectiveness of stacked bar charts is often debated—sometimes, they can be confusing, difficult to understand, and may make data series comparisons challenging. Figure 1.2: Example of a grouped bar chart. Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all the stated requirements. Your submitted image should include your GT username in the bottom left. 6 Version 0 Figure 1.3: Example of a stacked bar chart after selecting “4 Players” in Max.Players filter. Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all the stated requirements. Your submitted image should include your GT username in the bottom left. 7 Version 0 Important Points about Developing with D3 in Questions 2–5 1. We highly recommend that you use the latest Chrome browser to complete this question. We will grade your work using Chrome v92 (or higher). 2. You will work with version 5 of D3 in this homework. You must NOT use any D3 libraries (d3*.js) other than the ones provided in the lib folder. 3. For Q3–5, your D3 visualization MUST produce a DOM structure as specified at the end of each question. Not only does the structure help guide your D3 code design, but it also enables your code to be auto-graded (the auto-grader identifies and evaluates relevant elements in the rendered HTML). We highly recommend you review the specified DOM structure before starting to code. 4. You need to setup a local HTTP server in the root (hw2-skeleton) folder to run your D3 visualizations, as discussed in the D3 lecture (OMS students: the video “Week 5 – Data Visualization for the Web (D3) – Prerequisites: JavaScript and SVG”. Campus students: see lecture PDF.). The easiest way is to use http.server for Python 3.x. (for more details, see link). 5. All d3*.js files in the lib folder must be referenced using relative paths, e.g., “../lib/” in your html files. For example, if the file “Q2/submission.html” uses d3, its header should contain:It is incorrect to use an absolute path such as:6. For questions that require reading from a dataset, use a relative path to read in the dataset file. For example, suppose a question reads data from earthquake.csv, the path should simply be “earthquake.csv” and NOT an absolute path such as “C:/Users/polo/hw2-skeleton/Q/earthquake.csv”. 7. You can and are encouraged to decouple the style, functionality and markup in the code for each question. That is, you can use separate files for CSS, JavaScript and html. 8 Version 0 Q2 [15 points] Force-directed graph layout Goal Create a network graph shows relationships between games in D3. Use interactive features like pinning nodes to give the viewer some control over the visualization. Technology D3 Version 5 (included in the lib folder) Chrome v92.0 (or higher): the browser for grading your code Python http server (for local testing) Allowed Libraries D3 library is provided to you in the lib folder. You must NOT use any D3 libraries (d3*.js) other than the ones provided. On Gradescope, these libraries are provided for you in the auto-grading environment. Deliverables [Gradescope] Q2.(html/js/css): The HTML, JavaScript, CSS to render the graph. Do not include the D3 libraries or board_games.csv dataset. You will experiment with many aspects of D3 for graph visualization. To help you get started, we have provided the Q2.html file (in the Q2 folder) and an undirected graph dataset of boardgames, board_games.csv file (in the Q2 folder). The dataset for this question was inspired by a Reddit post about visualizing boardgames as a network, where the author calculates the similarity between board games based on categories and game mechanics where the edge value between each board game (node) is the total weighted similarity index. This dataset has been modified and simplified for this question and does not fully represent actual data found from the post. The provided Q2.html file will display a graph (network) in a web browser. The goal of this question is for you to experiment with the visual styling of this graph to make a more meaningful representation of the data. Here is a helpful resource (about graph layout) for this question. Note: You can submit a single Q2.html that contains all the css and js components; or you can split Q2.html into Q2.html, Q2.css, and Q2.js. 1. [2 points] Adding node labels: Modify Q2.html to show the node label (the node name, e.g., the source) at the top right of each node in bold. If a node is dragged, its label must move with it. 2. [3 points] Styling edges: Style the edges based on the “value” field in the links array: 1. If the value of the edge is equal to 0 (similar), the edge should be gray, thick, and solid (The dashed line with zero gap is not considered as solid). 2. If the value of the edge is equal to 1 (not similar), the edge should be green, thin, and dashed. 3. [3 points] Scaling nodes: a. [1.5 points] Scale the radius of each node in the graph based on the degree of the node (you may try linear or squared scale, but you are not limited to these choices). Note: Regardless of which scale you decide to use, you should avoid extreme node sizes, which will likely lead to low-quality visualization (e.g., nodes that are mere points, barely visible, or of huge sizes with overlaps). Note: D3 v5 does not support d.weight (which was the typical approach to obtain node degree in D3 v3). You may need to calculate node degrees yourself. Example relevant approach is here. b. [1.5 points] The degree of each node should be represented by varying colors. Pick a meaningful color scheme (hint: color gradients). There should be at least 3 color gradations and it must be visually evident that the nodes with a higher degree use darker/deeper colors and the nodes with lower degrees use lighter colors. You can find example color gradients at Color Brewer. 9 Version 0 4. [6 points] Pinning nodes: a. [2 points] Modify the code so that dragging a node will fix (i.e., “pin”) the node’s position such that it will not be modified by the graph layout algorithm (Note: pinned nodes can be further dragged around by the user. Additionally, pinning a node should not affect the free movement of the other nodes). Node pinning is an effective interaction technique to help users spatially organize nodes during graph exploration. The D3 API for pinning nodes has evolved over time. We recommend reading this post when you work on this sub-question. b. [1 points] Mark pinned nodes to visually distinguish them from unpinned nodes, i.e., show pinned nodes in a different color. c. [3 points] Double clicking a pinned node should unpin (unfreeze) its position and unmark it. When a node is no longer pinned, it should move freely again. IMPORTANT: 1. To pass autograder consistently for part 1 (which tests if a dragged node becomes pinned and retains its position), you may need to increase the radius of highly weighted nodes and reduce their label sizes, so that the nodes can be more easily detected by the autograder’s webdriver mouse cursor. 2. To avoid timeout errors on Gradescope, complete the double click function in part 3 before submitting. 3. If you receive timeout messages for all parts and your code works locally on your computer, verify that you are indeed using the appropriate ids provided in the “add the nodes” section in the skeleton code. 4. D3 v5 does not support the d.fixed method (it was deprecated after D3 v3). For our purposes, it is used as a Boolean value to indicate whether a node has been pinned or not. 5. [1 points] Add GT username: Add your Georgia Tech username (usually includes a mix of letters and numbers, e.g., gburdell3) to the top right corner of the force-directed graph (see example image). The GT username must be a element having the id: “credit” Figure 2: Example of Visualization with pinned node (yellow). Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all the stated requirements. 10 Version 0 Q3 [15 points] Line Charts Goal Explore temporal patterns in the BoardGameGeek data using line charts in D3 to compare how the number of ratings grew. Integrate additional data about board game rankings onto these line charts and explore the effect of axis scale choice. Technology D3 Version 5 (included in the lib folder) Chrome v92.0 (or higher): The browser used for grading your code Python HTTP server (for local testing) Allowed Libraries D3 library is provided to you in the lib folder. You must NOT use any D3 libraries (d3*.js) other than the ones provided. On Gradescope, these libraries are provided for you in the autograder environment. Deliverables [Gradescope] Q3.(html / js / css): The HTML, JavaScript, CSS to render the line charts. Do not include the D3 libraries or boardgame_ratings.csv dataset. Use the dataset in the file boardgame_ratings.csv (in the Q3 folder) to create line charts. Refer to the tutorial for line chart here: Note: You will create four charts in this question, which should be placed one after the other on a single HTML page, like the example image below (Figure 3). Note that your design need NOT be identical to the example; however, the submission must follow the DOM structure specified at the end of this question. IMPORTANT: use the Margin Convention guide for specifying chart dimensions and layout. The autograder will assume this convention has been followed for grading purposes. The SVG viewBox attribute is not recommended to define the position and dimension of your SVG. 1. [5 points] Creating line chart. Create a line chart (Figure 3.1) that visualizes the number of board game ratings from November 2016 to August 2020 (inclusively), for the eight board games: [‘Catan’, ‘Dominion’, ‘Codenames’, ‘Terraforming Mars’, ‘Gloomhaven’, ‘Magic: The Gathering’, ‘Dixit’, ‘Monopoly’]. Use d3.schemeCategory10() to differentiate these board games. Add each board game’s name next to its corresponding line. For the x-axis, show a tick label for every three months. Use D3 axis.tickFormat() and d3.timeFormat() to format the ticks to display abbreviated months and years. For example, Jan 17, Apr 17, Jul 17. (See Figure 3.1 and its x-axis ticks). ● Chart title: Number of Ratings 2016-2020 ● Horizontal axis label: Month. Use D3.scaleTime(). ● Vertical axis label: Num of Ratings. Use a linear scale (for this part). VERY IMPORTANT — Beware of “Silent Date Conversion”: Opening the csv file in an application like Excel may silently modify date strings without warning you, e.g., converting hyphen-separated date strings (e.g., 2016-11-01) into slash-separated date strings (e.g., 11/01/16). Impacted students would see a “correct” line chart visualization on their local computers, but when they upload their code to Gradescope, test cases will fail (e.g., tick labels are not found, lines are not drawn) because the x-scale cannot be computed (as the dates are parsed as NaN). To view the content of a csv file, we recommend you only use text editors (e.g., sublime text, notepad) that do not silently modify csv files. 2. [5 points] Adding board game rankings. Create a line chart (Figure 3.2) for this part (append to the same HTML page) whose design is a variant of what you have created in part 1. Start with your chart from part 1. Modify the code to visualize how the rankings of [‘Catan’, ‘Codenames’, ‘Terraforming Mars’, ‘Gloomhaven’] change over time by adding a symbol with the ranking text on their corresponding lines. Show the symbol for every three months and exactly align with the x-axis ticks in part 1. (See Figure 3.2). Add a legend to explain what this symbol represents next to your chart (See the Figure 3.2 bottom right). 11 Version 0 ● Chart title: Number of Ratings 2016-2020 with Rankings 3. [5 points] Axis scales in D3. Create two line charts (Figure 3.3-1 and 3.3-2) for this part (append to the same HTML page) to try out two axis scales in D3. Start with your chart from part 2. Then modify the vertical axis scale for each chart: the first chart uses the square root scale for its vertical axis (only), and the second chart uses the log scale for its vertical axis (only). Keep the symbols and the symbol legend you implemented in part 2. At the bottom right of the last chart, add your GT username (e.g., gburdell3, see Figure 3.3-2 for example). Note: the horizontal axes should be kept in linear scale, and only the vertical axes are affected. Hint: You may need to carefully set the scale domain to handle the 0s in data. ● First chart (Figure 3.3-1) ○ Chart title: Number of Ratings 2016-2020 (Square root Scale) ○ This chart uses the square root scale for its vertical axis (only) ○ Other features should be the same as part 2. ● Second chart (Figure 3.3-2) ○ Chart title: Number of Ratings 2016-2020 (Log Scale) ○ This chart uses the log scale for its vertical axis (only). Set the y-scale domain minimum to 1. ○ Other features should be the same as part 2. Figure 3.1: Example line chart. Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all stated requirements. Figure 3.2: Example of a line chart with rankings. Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all stated requirements. 12 Version 0 Figure 3.3-1: Example of a line chart using square root scale. Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all stated requirements. Figure 3.3-2: Example of a line chart using log scale. Your chart may appear different and can earn full credit if it meets all stated requirements. 13 Version 0 Note: Your D3 visualization MUST produce the following DOM structure. plot (Q3.1) | +– chart title | +– containing Q3.1 plot elements | +– containing plot lines, line labels | +– x-axis | | | +– (x-axis elements) | | | +– x-axis label | +– y-axis | +– (y-axis elements) | +– y-axis label plot (Q3.2) | +– chart title | +– containing Q3.2 plot elements | | | +– containing plot lines, line labels | | | +– for x-axis | | | | | +– (x-axis elements) | | | | | +– x-axis label | | | +– for y-axis | | | | | +– (y-axis elements) | | | | | +– for y-axis label | | | +– containing plotted symbols, symbol labels | +– containing legend symbol and legend text element(s) plot (Q3.3-1): same as format for Q3.2, with c-1 in ids (e.g., id=”svg-c-1″, etc.) plot (Q3.3-2): same as format for Q3.2, with c-2 in ids (e.g., id=”svg-c-2″, etc.)