Believe it or not: I don't actually swim in the river.
For this project we opted to bend the rules a little and work with personal data, all of our personal data. For a little over a week we used our phones to track our GPS data once every ten minutes. The initial idea was developed as a curiosity to how different students of different majors navigate Pitt's large, urban campus. Unlike more sectioned off campuses, such as CMU, Pitt's "campus" is hardly distinguishable from Oakland itself. I realized how many students live and work around Pitt that I have never met or interacted with despite having been here for three years. By chance, all of us ended up in this group, in this class. We have never met each other before now and likely never would have if this class did not exist. With that in mind, we were curious how us, with extremely different majors and jobs, traverse Pitt's campus in an average week.
There were some major bumps along the way. Some were more personal and others impacted the group as a whole. The biggest issue I faced during this process was that I was away on a photo assignment from last Thursday to this Sunday. I underestimated how busy I would be during this time and was barely able to even answer my group members when they messaged. I'm pretty sure I missed all of our group meetings. Ultimately, I worked 40 hours this weekend and 0 of them were for this project. I am in no way claiming to be blameless in this, but I cannot imagine how that could have possibly played out differently. Overall, this project was horrible timing for me and I hope my mad dash work the last few days made up for my prolonged absence. And hey, I have the data to prove where I was.
I primarily worked on the layout and presentation of the website. Connor had a bootstrap template skeleton ready by the time I started working but I linked the pages together, reformatted the design, refined everything, assigned the colors per person, and overall made everything cohesive. I also helped make sure everyone was collecting their data fluidly and correctly. There were many bumps for our iphone users but those of us with android phone's ended up finding a very nice app that worked extremely well. I don't think our current project even scratches the surface of what could be represented with the data gathered from our android gps app.
Bokeh is horrible and if I had been able to pay half a second of attention at the start I would have pushed to use something else. I should have realized what a problem it would be when I mentioned to my CS roommate what we were using and he just started laughing. In our late night Hillman session, we were still unable to get the bokeh visualization to embed nicely on the site. To mitigate this issue I went ahead and used google's custom maps function to create quick embeddable versions for the page. If the bokeh map didn't turn out, we were just going to link to it as a progress view. Ultimately the bokeh "works" (though I still have many issues with how it looks and functions). Still, I left everyone's individual data on their statement pages as the google embeds so more individualized views could be achieved, as well as for aesthetic's sake.