Comparison of Software
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JMP |
Tableau |
Tibco Spotfire
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| Advantages |
- It is a good statistical software that allows one to build graphs and experiment them on different distributions. Individual graphs can also be built, and distribution graphs are relatively easy to be constructed to do data exploration.
- It is also relatively simple to conduct data cleaning on JMP, such as recoding attributes.
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- Tableau provides interactivity within each sheet and dashboard. It also allows users to build dashboard and add actions such as "filter" and "highlight".
- There are a variety of visualisation methods that are available on Tableau. This allows users to easily find the visulisation that would fit their analysis best. Also, in this case of the assignment, divergent bar charts can be constructed on Tableau.
- Workbooks can also be published online, on Tableau Online. This allows for users to share their work with other users of Tableau.
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- Tibco Spotfire also has a relatively good user interface, that allows for users to easily select the variables that they need and the kind of visualisation that they want to use. Tibco Spotfire provides a recommended variety of charts and visualisation once users select the variables that they want to analyse.
- Also, the treemap that is generated by Tibco is an interactive surface. This means that once I click on a variable in the hierarchy, the visualisation arranges itself automatically. Also, the treemaps that are provided have headers that are labelled by colour intensity and are arranged by their hierarchy.
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| Disadvantages |
- As individual graphs are built on JMP, they cannot be combined to form one visualisation. This makes it hard for users to understand what is going on with the use of different charts. As such, I had refrained from using JMP.
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- It is difficult to conduct data cleaning on Tableau, because individual attributes cannot be edited in the interface.
- Parallel Coordinates cannot be constructed with the use of Tableau. Also, the Treemap may not be as user-friendly, because of the lack of display functions (i.e. hierarchy labels).
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- It is difficult to edit the data on Tibco Spotfire, as compared to JMP, as individual attributes cannot be edited.
- Dashboards cannot be built, and in this case, apart from combining a few graphs and visualisations in one sheet, it is difficult to combine more than 3 visualisations in one page as compared to Tableau.
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Conclusion
As I sought to understand why faculty members and their opinion towards Wikipedia, the analysis through the visualisations allowed me to gain a better understanding. The environment of the university may play a role in encouraging users to use Wikipedia, however, it may not directly affect a faculty member's individual opinion on the use of Wikipedia. For example, through the analysis, I found that even users of Wikipedia who were experienced faculty members of UPF, believed that Wikipedia was a good teaching resource. In general, however, most faculty members who use Wikipedia tend to be adjunct faculty members with less than 5 years of experience. This is probably because less experienced professors may not have had the chance to build up their knowledge repository with extensive years of research, and hence, find that Wikipedia is a good repository for teaching information.
