I love the idea of the assignment so much! I feel a day is not enough for me to think thoroughly about an idea. As I know, whatever I decide now could change for many reasons, including feasibility. First idea: I found an exciting dataset about the history of video games, and I think mapping out that experience would be engaging across time and locations. I recently visited the exhibit “Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion to Deception”. It was fascinating to see the different stories maps can create. The pattern I enjoyed the most was “tree” maps (shown in the image below). I would love to explore that pattern even further and try ways to increase the expressiveness of this pattern.

image of tree maps

Second idea: social annotation creates interesting traces on online materials that could be interesting to visualize. At first, I thought the annotations on the document served as the map! However, I think it might be interesting to explore different ways to represent that information differently. Maybe aggregate view on the document instead of individual annotations? Or express the annotations over time instead of location on the document? I’m worried about the feasibility of this idea, as I don’t have any inspirations that I can look at or learn from. I have access to annotation datasets; I’m not sure how to map out the data meaningfully.