Projects

Projects are group assignments in which students build small prototypes that integrate concepts learned in Info 202. You are required to work in groups of 3 or 4 for each project.

In project 1–3, your group must be composed of different people each time; in project 4, you may work with whomever you wish.

Individually, you will have 4 project presentations. You don’t have to present in every single one of them, but you are required to present at least once during the semester.

Project Submission Guidelines

Projects are due at 12 pm on their respective due dates, unless otherwise specified.
Late submission will result in a 10% deduction
Email the github link to your project to both krushton@ischool.berkeley and raymonst@berkeley
In the README.md file, include the following:
- Project title
- Project description
- Team members and roles
- Technologies used
- Link to demo version
- Known bugs
Use this format for the email subject line:
IO Lab - P #, e.g. "IO Lab - P 2"
During presentation day, all students’ projects will be presented using the instructor’s computer. This is done to save set-up time when we switch from one team to the next. If your project is not web-based/accessible from the browser, please let us know in your submission.
Failure to follow submission guidelines will result in a 10% deduction

P 1 / Memex

Deadline

Oct 2, 2013

Grading

10 points

Description

For this assignment, students will create a related implementation that explores the idea of trails as a mechanism for organizing information. We suggest using Delicious & Delicious API, although you are free to use other APIs as you see fit.

Options

Select one of the following as a possible starting point:

Standalone Trail Maker: Create an interface that allows people to create trails (from more than one user’s bookmarks), search, and go through tags.
Trail Browser: Create an interface that displays all of a Delicious user’s trails and lets you navigate through them. The navigation interface could be purely textual and display metadata from Delicious. It could also display bookmarked pages themselves within an iframe or by using a screencapture utility like webkit2png or khtml2png.
Post to Trail: Build an extension to modify the Delicious “Post a Bookmark” screen so that a user can add a bookmark to an existing trail or create a new one.
Trail Maker at Delicious: Build an extension to modify the Delicious bookmarks page to allow users to create a trail from their bookmarks within the current Delicious interface.

P 2 / Controlled Vocabularies

Deadline

Oct 23, 2013

Grading

15 points

Description

In “Metacrap”, Cory Doctorow listed seven problems with explicit metadata. For this project, students will build or modify an interface as a way to potentially address one of these problems, making it easier to use a controlled and consistent vocabulary.

Examples

People are lazy: A user interface that suggests tags to use on Twitter, so users can follow the strict tagging principles defined in 202. A service that scans news articles and automatically tags them using TimesTags API.
People are stupid: A user interface on top of Amazon or eBay that auto-corrects spelling mistakes (e.g. “iPhnoe 4” and “Andriod”) or suggests spellings that are more popular. A Delicious extension that scans user’s submission and automatically inserts the canonical version of the URL when the user saves a bookmark.

You can use the examples above as a starting point. Alternatively, you can start a different project that tackles another one of Doctorow’s strawmen and explores the concept of controlled vocabularies in the process.

P 3 / Social & Distributed Classifications

Deadline

Nov 13, 2013

Grading

15 points

Description

Explore existing social & distributed classifications using data visualization.

Examples

A visualization of someone’s Instagram account, including frequently used tags, most popular photos, etc.
An interface that visualizes Yelp ratings for businesses around a location specified by the user.
A visualization of someone’s favorite songs and/or artists and how popular they are on Spotify.

You can use the examples above as a starting point, but don’t feel limited by them. We encourage you to think about different project ideas that explore the concept of social & distributed classification through data visualization.

P 4 / IO & IR (Final Project)

Deadline

Dec 10, 2013
11:59 pm

Grading

25 points

Description

Over the course of the semester we’ve explored and introduced a number of tools for working with information. In this project, students will tackle an information organization and retrieval problem of their choosing.

Examples

A visualization of political opinions gathered from Mechanical Turk surveys.
A game that asks the user to guess a trending topic based on data scraped from Twitter & Instagram.
A map visualization of street art locations in a city.
A mobile web app that helps tourists find local points of interest using data from Wikitravel and data.gov.

You can use the examples above as a starting point, but don’t feel limited by them. Build and explore a topic of information organization and retrieval that you find interesting. This project is open-ended on purpose and is meant for you to synthesize what you’e learned throughout the semester.