General Discussions
This is the place to discuss general issues related to the U-boat war or the war at sea in WWII.
Data visualization of merchant sinkings available
Posted by:
g_a_u
()
Date: January 13, 2016 11:23PM
To all members of the uboat.net community,
Around April of last year I completed a rough draft of a data visualization of the Battle of the Atlantic using the data available on uboat.net. I sent it to Guðmundur as a rough proof-of-concept of something that might be somehow featured or integrated on the website, then both of us became distracted with other issues, real life, etc., and the thing has been sitting unused on my personal server ever since. It's only now occurred to me, strangely enough, that there's no real reason why fans of uboat.net shouldn't be flagged about its existence.
It's at, [personal.psu.edu]
The webpage itself works with either Firefox or Chrome (never got around to testing it on Safari). The "About" tab will tell you all the facts, to paraphrase Auden. Besides unnecessary ugliness and non-optimization, I'll have to ask the community's especial forbearance with the pie- and bar-charts below the map. At the time I used a shortcut for keeping them updated with the data on the map that leads to inaccuracies, besides being pretty damn opaque in its display and usage--I now know far better ways of doing this, but it would just be too involved to rewrite that part of the code.
The visualization as a whole is in fact littered with fossil remains of evolutionary dead-ends or might-have-beens (I haven't kept "beta" in its url for nothing). I stopped work on the project not only because of competing demands on my time, but also because I'm essentially an accidental researcher into submarine warfare, having no strong interest in the subject that would guide me in what would be useful or neat to visualize.
I'd be interested of course in any suggestions you the uboat.net community might have for new or improved features, either with the merchant-sinkings data already used in the visualization, or anything else available on uboat.net. Can't promise I'll do any of it (am still swamped with other things), but would certainly like to know what actual experts in the subject would like to see in a visualization.
Best regards,
Gabriel
Around April of last year I completed a rough draft of a data visualization of the Battle of the Atlantic using the data available on uboat.net. I sent it to Guðmundur as a rough proof-of-concept of something that might be somehow featured or integrated on the website, then both of us became distracted with other issues, real life, etc., and the thing has been sitting unused on my personal server ever since. It's only now occurred to me, strangely enough, that there's no real reason why fans of uboat.net shouldn't be flagged about its existence.
It's at, [personal.psu.edu]
The webpage itself works with either Firefox or Chrome (never got around to testing it on Safari). The "About" tab will tell you all the facts, to paraphrase Auden. Besides unnecessary ugliness and non-optimization, I'll have to ask the community's especial forbearance with the pie- and bar-charts below the map. At the time I used a shortcut for keeping them updated with the data on the map that leads to inaccuracies, besides being pretty damn opaque in its display and usage--I now know far better ways of doing this, but it would just be too involved to rewrite that part of the code.
The visualization as a whole is in fact littered with fossil remains of evolutionary dead-ends or might-have-beens (I haven't kept "beta" in its url for nothing). I stopped work on the project not only because of competing demands on my time, but also because I'm essentially an accidental researcher into submarine warfare, having no strong interest in the subject that would guide me in what would be useful or neat to visualize.
I'd be interested of course in any suggestions you the uboat.net community might have for new or improved features, either with the merchant-sinkings data already used in the visualization, or anything else available on uboat.net. Can't promise I'll do any of it (am still swamped with other things), but would certainly like to know what actual experts in the subject would like to see in a visualization.
Best regards,
Gabriel
| Subject | Written By | Posted |
|---|---|---|
Data visualization of merchant sinkings available
|
g_a_u | 01/13/2016 11:23PM |