This is re-posted from the Hive Research Lab blog.

This past Spring, members of Hive Research Lab worked with students in Indiana University’s IVMOOC, an online information visualization course, to take data about Hive-funded projects and partnerships and see what sorts of interesting patterns might emerge through various visualization techniques. The data was self-reported and derived from project proposals–the resulting prototypes offer new ways to visualize the types of activities and collaborations that take place within Hive NYC. In this two part series, we interview each of the two teams of students that worked with the data to have them share their process, the visualizations they came up with, and reflections on what it was like working with Hive NYC data.

In the first post of this two part series, we spoke with Team Buzz Buzz, made up of Simon Duff, Camaal Moten, John Patterson, Ann Priestley and Sarah Webber.

Hive Research Lab (HRL): Tell us a bit about your approach to visualizing the Hive. What kind of process did the team go through?

Camaal Moten (CM), Team Buzz Buzz (TBB): We began the process by identifying our research questions, thinking about potential Hive NYC needs, and hand-sketching some ideas to explore the various visualization techniques we were learning each week. Our low-fidelity sketches allowed us to quickly problem-solve and be creative, while providing a basis for discussions between the team and Hive Research Lab. We used components of the exemplary visualizations shared during class as a starting point, and then worked within the team provide feedback on each other’s ideas. After a few rounds of discussion, we decided upon two visualization techniques and began adding more detail to each sketch to match the dataset.

We then began cleaning the dataset and made a normalized version to maintain consistency throughout the team and began appending the unique data needed to create our proposed visualizations. For example, John used the member locations to append the latitude and longitude coordinates to the dataset for our geospatial visualization. We also gathered background information on each organization and looked for new ways to interpret the data or additional data points that could be added.

As the project progressed, we used a shared Google+ community page to post examples of preliminary results from the dataset and provided each other with feedback. We continued this process until we created a high-fidelity visualization that matched our sketch. This iterative process of cleaning, parsing, and visualizing the data continued throughout the entire project. Each cycle of feedback inspired new visualization ideas and expanded the final results. We spent most of our time transforming data, so one of the highlights was when one of our team members created a script that could automatically transform our excel data into the Graph Exchange XML Format (GEFX) used in Gephi (an open-source data visualization application). In the end, we added even more visualizations that were not included in the original scope. We were having too much fun!

John Patterson (JP), Team Buzz Buzz (TBB): I think Camaal covers it well. Interestingly, the majority of the time visualizing Hive NYC was spent on data organization and data transformation and not on the visualization itself. What felt different about data visualization compared to some other data analysis approaches is that we constantly faced new challenges requiring a mix of skills. For example we wanted to show Hive NYC as it changed over time, so we needed to get the data into GEXF format. There was a “Wait how do we do that?” moment and Simon (the programmer in our team) was able to solve that challenge and write a short script. This meant Camaal (our designer/social network analyst) could then get back to visualizing. So the process required lots of collaboration. Google+ really surprised me in how easy it facilitated this kind of work.

HRL: Let’s have a look at the visualizations that the team produced. What do you think they show about Hive NYC?

Collaboration Network Visualization (click for hi-res version) Continue reading →