Our project
Our project is concerned with building visualizations for an extensive collection of archival material custody of The British Library. To this day, browsing the collection meant having exposure and interest in an exact subset of the database, with text-based search mechanisms and detailed project-specific item structure. Our aim was to present ways to extract meaning out of the data in visual context. We believe the outcome of this shift should bring more visitors to the collection. Our solution was to filter the data to uncover new relationships between them and finally display them in an interactive and informative way as visualisations.
Requirements
Research
HCI
Design
Testing
Evaluation
Management
Key features
Uncovering hidden relations
The main achievement of the project was flattening out the data, taking it out of its hierarchical form and uncovering relationships of size and prevalence from a birds-eye view over the items. We employed 5 different ideas encoding statistics ranging from the distribution of funding across the world to more subtle relations between the content type of the records gathered.
Broad user persona
We thought of the user as wishing to discover the most relevant parts of the collection in a few clicks, while also retaining the exploration fell of the navigation. The resulting web app emerged from a combination of our user consideration and functionality driven data-mapping.
Interlinked visualizations
Incrementally building upon the website in an Agile focused style allowed us to build visualizations from the ground up, from sketching ideas to fully functional standalone overviews. We made use of the insights gathered in that process to suggest different subsets/visualizations of the data to the user.
Video
This is our video presenting final prototype of our project
Our Team
We are three 2nd year Computer Science students at University College London.
Mircea-Andrei Barbu
andrei.barbu.16@ucl.ac.uk
Back End Developer, Researcher
Stefanos Evripidou
stefanos.evripidou.16@ucl.ac.uk
Visualisation designer, Client Liaison
Ringo Chu
ringo.chu.16@ucl.ac.uk
Front-end developer, Website editor