Sunday, August 11, 2013

First steps

Starting from the two projects done as part of cs-171 visualization class, I was trying to define what it is that I want to do for my thesis. With Hanspeter guidance I started thinking of the tasks I want to enable in the visualization and came up with:


  • What are the visual themes of a given writing system?
  • How visually similar are different systems?
  • What are the connections between the similarity level of writing systems and their geographical and historical proximity?



Then I met with Alex and with his help I started thinking of how to give form to the data that can help answer the research questions. A few important notes that came up in the meeting were:



In parallel I was working with Jeff in order to complete my Thesis proposal and have it approved. This included summarizing the previous projects, investigating some of the technical aspects of the implementation and of course, above all, trying to design the project.

I have had several views in mind - a connected graph and a map of the world were the main ones. I realized that the space distribution view is effective for visual comparison and decided to use it as well. However this view represented spoken languages and I will want to combine them into writing systems. To this I wished to add sorting and filtering.

Sorting by:


  • Convexity
  • Density
  • Segmentation
  • Number of spoken languages

  • Filtering by:


  • Geography (continent)
  • History (time of writing system creation)

  • (add images)


    I was thinking of the transition between the visualizations and decided a tabbed layout makes most sense.

    (add images)

    As for the main view, the space distribution did not necessarily provide a strong sense of the visual themes of a given writing system (example Thai) so I am trying to find a better way of capturing it. I'm currently focusing on the idea of curve fitting (either based on the space dist. or using the contours provided by the glyph library.

    I have issues gathering the information for the history and geography layers - it is too fuzzy and not  well structured enough for scripting. How do I determine the geography of a given script? Do I manually enter the time period for each language?

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