Aliens Arrive
A UFO sightings review in the last century in U.S.
Background
Outer space is always the most attractive and mysterious topics that make not only give scientists and sci-fi writers inspirations but make the masses crazy. In this project, we hope to apply interesting interactive visualizations to several data insights about UFO sightings in the last century in the U.S.
My role: overall design and ideation, code with d3.js.
A description of data
In this project, we get the inspiration from a dataset on Kaggle, which contains over 80,000 reports of UFO sightings over the last century.
Also, we use the universal World-50m.json and us-states.json for the map drawing.
Data Formatting and Filtering
In this dataset, there are mainly the following columns:
We use d3 and Panda( python library) for the data cleaning and formatting. There are mainly three steps we do here:
We format the datetime column to a year column in order to simplify the animation as there are more than 80,000 records.
We calculate the total amount of sightings for every year for the visualization.
We calculate the total amount of each shape of the UFO.
We reorganize the record in the U.S
Data to visual elements mapping
In this project, we hope to bring interesting insights to the audience by utilizing this dataset, therefore, we designed three sections for delivering different data insights. Each section is isolated from each other but is connected underneath.
UFO landing map
We believe it will be amazingly fancy and inspiring for the audience if we can show them the process of all the UFO sightings in an interesting and vivid way. We come up with many ideas for this main visualization and finally decided on the ideation inspired by the sci-fi movie, Independence Day.
In this movie, a huge UFO floating over the earth and all the alien army will be sent off from the gate of this huge spaceship. We believe it will be a cool idea if we can also design a UFO floating over the U.S. Imagine all the UFOs that have been sighted are released by this huge UFO, and then landed to different spots. All the lines represent the journey that the UFO is released and fly to the earth. The circle on the map represents that the location the each UFO is sighted.
Section 2:
Besides a fancy visualization of the overall history of these 80000 UFO sightings, we hope to utilize the dataset to present more interesting facts. Therefore, in section 2, we hope to show audience UFO sightings by years. We imply a time slider for allowing the audience to control the exact year and all the UFO insights will be highlighted and a total amount of the sightings in this year will be shown. Also, we present two small plots to present the contrast between all the sightings over the century and the sightings only within the chosen year. The audience could hover over the circle to see the location of the UFO.
Section 3:
In this dataset, we have a very interesting data points about the shape of the UFO according to the reporters. We use this data present a visualization of different shapes. The audience can hover over each shape components to see how many sightings of this shape have been witnessed within the last century.
Some other practice：A World Cup Prediction Web
