Palladio

For my time using Palladio, I imported the data set on Ibn Jubayr’s travels in the middle east. Some of the data was difficult to interpret, such as the number corresponding to each bag, so when trying to visualize the data, I was unsure how to make use of that column. Palladio was also unable to initially visualize the latitude and longitude columns, so I ued open refine to clean up this data and join the columns together into one coordinates column. Once this was fixed, Palladio was able to make nice maps of such coordinates. There were a nice range of the types of displays for each map, and one can even add in their own background for the map. This gives you the option to create a map that shows more of the meaning behind your data, since certain locations are better represented in a different way depending on ones feelings towards the location or its historical significance. However, because my dataset did not include more data whose values were specific places, I was unable to tke advantage of the point to point feature on the map, which would have allowed me to visualize which points were connected, and with the tooltip label I could have added the dates that these connections took place, allowing me to create visualizations across both time and space. With the graphs feature, given the information in the data set, I was able to create a representation across time and space. I was able to show the dates in which certain travels took place, and the places that were visited within each time frame. Because the data types were not limited to Latitude-Longitude values, it felt much easier to visualize the data I was given in the graphs tab. Other features included the table and gallery features, both of which made the data much easier to digest given it was being interpreted on a much smaller scale, but for the gallery feature specifically, I couldn’t take full advantage of it due to a lot of missing images.

I think for the specific data set I was analyzing, it would be nice to have a visualization that maps the coordinate locations of Ibn’s travles, much like Palladio did, but there could be a way to show how these points follow one another, and with the option to show the text associated with each location, to give it more cultural connotation. This could have potentially created a visualization across time, space, and text.

TimelineJS

I used the data set on Melville’s travels in London to test out the capabilities of TimelineJS. The process to import the data was very easy, but it was not too complex in its abilities to show all of the data on my spreadsheet. It kind of did what you would image, which is just make a timeline. It showed the date in which events took place, and displayed the text that corresponded with the date. It seems this tool is best for showing temporal and textual/narrative relationships.