Rationale - Project B

My Project B is based on Geo-Narrative but also include pictures that show data visualisation. I chose to do geo-narrative because it seems easier to do than data visualisation on its own, and so I can explore the world of Google Maps. In this project I would like to show how data visualisation could also be added into geo-narrative. The collaboration between the two makes this project look interesting.

This geo-narrative that I have created is about comparing the success of Disneyland theme parks around the world with other theme parks such as Warner Bros and Universal Studios. In the map, I have used different color coordination to represent theme parks. I used blue to represent Disney, yellow to represent Warner Bros, and green to represent Universal Studios.

Each color I have chosen has special meanings to the theme parks. I assign Disney with the blue to match up with the color of its logo which is a castle on top of the cloud.

Warner Bros on the other hand, got yellow to represent itself on the map because their logo is yellow and it has a bright vibrant to it. Even though it also got the blue color but yellow is more dominant.

I have chosen green to represent Universal Studios on my map just because green is an enviromentally friendly color and also because the universal logo is earth.

All these mentioned entertainment companies have extended their wings all around the world. Disney has extended to many different cities and the extension goes from California to Orlando (Florida), Tokyo (Japan), Hongkong (Taiwan) and Paris (France). Disney also has some ongoing project in Honolulu (hawaii) which will be completed in 2011 and Dubai (Middle East) which is planned to be complete by 2020. Warner Bros extended from Los Angeles to Gold Coast (Australia), Madrid (Spain) and Essen (Germany).Universal had also extended from Los Angeles to Orlando (Florida), Osaka (Japan), Singapore and has one on going project in Seoul (South Korea) which is planned to be complete in 2014.

On the map I attached graphs in the individual text balloon. The first graph is visitors statistic and the second graph is Google Trends map that shows how often people are searching information for theme parks each year. I created the visitors graphs on Microsoft Excel and upload the graph image onto Flickr. After all got uploaded, I copied the HTML codes for individual image and paste it to HTML box on the map. The same with Google Trends graphs, I print screen the page and crop the print screen image using Photoshop. After that, I uploaded the image to Flickr and followed the same process above.

Although it is interesting and seems easy, I found some difficulties in making this project happened. When searching the number of visitors of each theme parks, it was really hard to find the official website that shows theme parks visitor's statistics. After long process of searching I finally found the annual report of TEA/ERA (Theme Park Attendance) report. Unfortunately, after looking at it did not find all the information I need. TEA/ERA only have Disney and Universal cisitor statistics and not Warner Bros. So I went back onto Google and start searching for Warner Bros visitor statistics. After hours of searching I finally found the official website of Village Roadshow Limited that has lists of Time Warner Annual Reports. But again not all the Warner Bros theme parks are listed in the reports. So I did another research on Google and after all the struggle I found a report of European Theme Parks Report. That is how I got all my data for theme park visitors and as you can see I did not get them easy. :(

Move along to Google Trends, it was also not easy to find the information I want even though it looks simpel. When I type my individual theme park onto it, it did not all come up with the result that I want. Some theme parks such as Dubailand (Disney Dubai), Aulani (Disney Hawaii), Warner Bros Studio (Los Angeles), Warner Bros Gold Coast (Australia), Universal Studio (Japan), and Universal Studio (Seoul, South Korea) just did not come up on Google Trends. I understand some of them might not come up because it has not operated just yet, but how about the others? I just don't understand and this makes me sad! :(

Despite all the difficulties I faced throughout the making process, in the end I am pretty satisfied with my project. I hope my informations will be useful to the public and it will also bring a good mark for this class. I hope you enjoy my "Famous Theme Parks Around the World Map"

Project B - on the making part 2

This week I have done placing tags of theme parks and studio on many different countries around the world. It has shown that all the theme parks I have chosen to compare are from the United States. Next thing that I'm going to do is to attach graphs in each pop up balloons on the map. I'm thinking to use google trends graph to show how many people are actually interested on finding information of these theme parks. I'm also going to make a graph of how many people are visiting these theme parks each year.

So I guess I'll tell you more in details about my awesome project in the next blog which is going to be a BIG FAT rationale (no, I don't think it's going to be that big).

Media Portrayal of Women: Female Stereotypes in the Media

Media Portrayal of Women: Female Stereotypes in the Media

project B - on the making part 1

On this Project B, I have decided to create a geo - narrative that will also include some data visualisation. According to Stephen the combination of the two would be interesting to look at and also challenging.

This project is going to be based on comparisons between Disney, Warner Bros, Universal and MGM theme parks all around the world. The comparisons between them will be shown in Google Maps. Currently, this Project is still under construction, so I'll update you with the latest news of this project later.

bye now!

data visualisation

There are many ways you can visualize data. It can be through colors, shape, size, thickness of a line, and many more.

In the tutorial today, we discussed many different example of data visualisation. One of the example that catches my attention was a video made out of many different information about the use of internet around the world. The use of size of globe that represents different numbers of people using internet each year worldwide and it starts from as little as 45.1 million in 1995 and the globe just keeps on growing up to 1.73 billion internet users worldwide.

Different colour coordination shown on how many spam messages you'd received each day in your mailbox and this was represent as red mails and taller piles, and normal mail was represent in white. I think this is a good way to demonstrate and really put a pressure on the message that they try to deliver.

The way they present the video is really unique i think because they have used the actual logos of particular websites. For example Twitter, they have used Twitter bird to describe how many tweets are going into twitter each day. They also use Asthon Kutcher as an example and attached his picture on the slide to show 4.63 million people are actually following him on twitter.

The same with YouTube, they presented the slide as if it was one of the video from youtube site that looks like a little television screen with navigation button underneath. They also associate the colour background accordingly with the colour theme on each websites (Twitter: light blue, YouTube: red)

collective intelligence, multiplicity week 10

This week lecture and tutorial topic is Multiplicity.

Our tutorial group come up with the idea on creating a City Car Tracker that can track all the cars in the city using the microchip that attached to every single cars in the city to feed GPS tracking signal.
This microchip will be aggregated through a database and the live feed shown on a web map, with cars represented as white dots. This map will give you an access to a data that shown the traffic in certain hours, rush hours, events and incidents that effected the traffic. Therefore, people could choose other directions to avoid traffic.

this microchip will also provide the governments with data to reassess where to build traffic lights, new road, roundabouts and adjusting the speed limits on certain areas if there are many accident involved in those areas.

If you like our ideas please support us on sending this great idea to the Australian government in order to get a better day on the road!

week 9

This week we were talking about Web 2.0.

In tutorial we were given a group task to identify the collective intelligence between blogger.com and wordpress.org.

By using google trends we found that using the search engine in google, wordpress is more popular than blogger. The reason was that wordpress is used by many companies so it is more corporate. Therefore, when you type in the company name into google search engine it will automatically comes as with wordpress URL.

Whereas under websites visited by the population, google trend showed that blogger is the most visited website than wordpress. The reason why is because blogger is more personal and easier to use than wordpress. The statistic shows that in 2002 there were 41,000 people registered with blogger.

The difference collective intelligence between blogger and wordpress is that blogger's blog roll is used to share information to other people and recommends other websites. Whereas wordpress blog roll is used to advertised the company's products so instead of driving the viewer's attention to other websites it actually keeps the viewers attention to the products the company sells.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=wordpress%2C+blogger
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=wordpress.org%2C+blogger.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0