The Hive

For Visual Culture & Design, students were asked to map a familiar space in an unfamiliar way. My idea was to capture the flow of students around Georgia Tech’s campus as— what else— swarms of yellow jackets. The end result is an interactive visualization that mixes analytic control with playful results.

My Role

  • Exploring novel analytic and aesthetic representations of the student body.
  • Crafting the visual design of the campus map and supporting interface.
  • Performing class and student data extraction from unstructured web content.
  • Implementing an interactive map using Flash and Flex.

Challenges

Data describing the Georgia Tech’s campus, classrooms, classes, and students are publicly available, but in a very unstructured format. This information must be collec­ted, processed, and structued in a format that can be used in the application. In addition, this should be done in a way that can be repeated as the underlying data changes.
The campus must be presented in a way that is familiar, can be manipulated, and can have data projected over it. In addition to being usable, the presentation should be novel and engaging.
Data about students and classes need to be presented on the map in an understandable but interesting way. In addition, the user should be able to filter or compare this information by hour, day, semester, class, or subject.