ISSS608 2016 17 T1 Project Team 3 Report
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Contents
Motivation
University ranking is always one consideration for to-be applicants. There is a certain prestige in having a better ranking, and universities generally work towards having better standing. According to Kaggle, "Ranking universities is a difficult, political, and controversial practice."
Through this visual analytics project, we look to analyse the world distribution of these universities, its attributes, rankings over time, and seek to draw insights from them.
This would also help parents, to-be applicants in their research for making informed decision in selecting their dream universities to pursue their higher education. 3 different sets of available university rankings are used in this visualizations. This would serve as an one stop-shop for them, instead of them scurrying about different websites and resources.
Review and Critic on Past Works
(Alvin)
In the paper by Gratzl, Lex, Gehlenborg, Pfister and Streit, an open source application called LineUp was utilized as an interactive technique for multiple attributes analysis. In this tool users are able to create the rankings of the universities based on their own assessment of the weightage of each attribute to the overall ranking. While this is an interesting way,
Design Framework
Overview
Data Source & Data Preparation
These three datasets provide similar, yet individualistic insight in the overall score of each university and its world rank, with multi-year records. Other time-variant attributes of the university are also available.
Design Principles Used
Tools Used & Data Visualisation Elements
Tableau Visualisation
- CWUR
Lichin
- SHANGHAI
Christine
- TIMES
Alvin
Qlik Sense Visualisation
d3.js
- Multi-Attributes Relationship
Scatter Plot
Parallel Coordinates Plot
Demo & Use Cases
Use Case #1 - University Management's Perspective
Use Case #2 - Prospective Student's Perspective
Discussion
Future Work
LC
- Inclusion of distribution of university on the choropleth map in D3 in ranking overview
- Inclusion of choice in choosing the country and university in indicator analysis for granularity view.
- Inclusion of a highlight feature for the selected node/university as its attribute moves through time in indicator analysis
Guides
Installation Guide
To run and use the application, please follow the following steps.
(1) Download the compressed package from the link provided below.
(Work in Progress)
(2) After unzipping the package, launch the ‘index.html’ file.
(Note: Mozilla Firefox is the preferred browser).
User Guide
After the ‘index.html’ file is launched using Mozilla Firefox, 5 tabs will present itself. One can toggle each tab to navigate through different visualizatons. Work In Progress
