2D Spatial Map
MAT 259, 2012
Dallas Mercer

Introduction
The concept of my 2nd Processing assignment is to find correlations and data facts of real-world events (of any kind) and see if the SPL data can visually show us these correlations (if any) by relating the subject matter to the titles of items checked out by people there. I chose the popular & real-world event of pregnancy. I was curious if there was a certain time of the year where people seemed to have more pregnancies than any other months. I was also curious if the data from the SPL would be in any way related to this question and if it might help me find some kind of visual aid/answer to this question.

Background
and Sketches
I want to search from the years 2005-2011 and do a count search for any item that has "pregnancy, pregnant, etc" in the title. I would then like this data count to be ordered by month and then year, then grouped by the year and then the month.

The visualization I would like to create along with this data will be graph/color-intensity like and will have 7 columns (years 2005-2011) and 12 rows (months of the year). I would like the "cells" with the most data counts to be darker than the others so we can easily see a difference between the neighboring cells and know that more "pregnancy items" were checked out then. I'm still not sure what colors I'd like to use in my Processing visual but I'll work on that soon. My sketch attached to this document is just done with a pencil so you can at least get the general idea.


Query
Select year(cout), month(cout), count(*) from inraw where title like "%pregnan%" and cout > "2005-01-01" and cout < '2012-01-01' group by month(cout), year(cout) order by year(cout), month(cout);
Explanation
I decided to use the word %pregnan% so I captured both "pregnancy" and "pregnant" in the title names

Result and
Analysis
The results were quite interesting in my opinion. To begin, I had trouble choosing the color scheme of this visualization. I ultimately just chose the rectangular cells to have a hue of 127 (the max. MIDI input number in digital audio). I then thought I'd match this green it produced to a tan and go with a somewhat "Army" theme... As you scroll over a cell, the number of items checked out that month will popup in white, and the higher the number the darker the cell. In my observations, I definitely see some kind of relationship here. It seems that in January, the 1st of the year, these items are checked out the most frequent. I also see that years 2008-2010 stand out the most on the darkness scale. Does that mean there were more pregnancies in just 3 years versus the others? This is the kind of information I would like to examine and see if it has any truth to it.


Code
I used Processing.

Run in Browser

Source Code