Qazi Zaid's Blog

  Storymap allows you to tell a story though interactive maps that take you on a virtual journey to the places which feature in your story.

Go to http://storymap.knightlab.com/ and get started by clicking on ‘Make a Storymap now’.

Storymap allows you to tag the places that feature in your story. It is a good idea to select stories that require such tagging to explain the story.

On the first page which will be the cover, write the heading in d heading section and its description below.

For the cover page, background colour and image can be selected, once you are through with that, click upload. Alternatively, In the Media option, one can post url of the video or upload an image which is relevant.

Do remember to give credits for the photo to its source and give caption.

A similar procedure is to be followed for all the sides. Slides can be added with add slide option and in the search option search for the specific location and select it.

The cover page will show links of all the location. Save and click publish changes.

Problems

If you are embedding the link of the storymap on a blog, make sure that you change the dimensions within which the stoprmay is displayed, suited for the theme that you have chosen for you blog.

If the dimensions are too big for the theme, the ends will cross the boundaries of the screen and at any given time, everything will not be visible. It becomes problematic to constantly keep scrolling up and down to view the entire slide.

Keep your text crisp and short, if one was willing to read a thousand words, one would not use storymap but pick up a book

Rebelmouse is a website that allows you to display all your social media feed on one page. It does that by letting you sync all your social media with rebelmouse and then display it on the page which has a URL of your choice and follows the pattern 

https://www.rebelmouse.com/[add name here]/

The exercise that we did, was to create a list on twitter and use that list to display the tweets of the people in the list on one page.

After creating the page and selecting our url in rebelmouse, we synced our twitter account with it

Then In the content source option,we pasted the url on the twitter space, clicked on add and then selected 'publish tweets and retweets'.

Similarly pages from facebook and other social media, can also be syced and content displayed, just paste the urls. 

Rebelmouse allows you to filter the posts from each social medium, in this case, twitter. 

We created the list on twitter according to our own interests and used it to publish tweets on the page, to have one single page where all the social media feed from the topic of our interest would be displayed.

Rebelmouse also allows you to select the layout in which the tweets are displayed 

Problems

The major problem we faced was that the website does not display protected content.Make sure the content you want o pull is public. it becomes easier for titter since it is a public platform. For facebook, only posts from public profiles and pages with no privacy setting will be displayed

Another problem, which should be written out in caps and bold is PATIENCE.

Fusion Tables and Google Code Playground - Easy Steps

We started off by creating a data table with the specifics of the students of MACJ in MCRC in Jamia which includied name, age marks etc.

The table was created in Google docs as a spread sheet by the students and each saved a copy. We imported the table into Google's Fusion Tables and visualised the data in the form of following infographics.

1. Age Groups of Students [Pie Chart / Bar Graph]

In the first visualisation we used the data to calculate and display the percentage of people which belonged to each age group (along with the number corresponding to the percentages), in Fusion Tables.

To do this we aggregated the data by age and counted how many students belonged to each age group. We did this by using 'aggregate' option in fusion tables and selected 'pie' from the various options in the visualise menu. 

We tried different ways of visualising the same data, trying different visualisations. The same data which is visualised in the form of a pie chart above has been done so in the the form of a bar graph below.

While doing this we had a slight problem that became a complication in achieving the result. The first mistake we did was that we had not aggregated the data (clubbed them together.) The second complication that arose was that after we had aggregated the data by age, it hadnt been showing the aggregated data by count. We overcame this issue by selecting 'count' in the drop down list.  

2. Geographic Locations of Students [Map]

We further used the Data to map geographic locations of the students on the map and count how many belong to each state.  

We did this by aggregating the data by state and then showing the aggregated data by count. The data was then displayed as map by selecting intensity map from the visualise menu

The mistake that we were doing in this was that the column in which we had input the data for the state that each student belonged to, had not been selected a location, as a result the software could not recognise the data as a location type. On changing the column type to location the problem got solved.

Another problem that was faced was that the names of the states were not typed properly in some cases (Eg. 'Jammu and Kashmir' was typed as Jammu & Kashmir) which resulted in google not recognising the state. On typing the names correctly, the problem got solved. 

3. Analysing Academic Progress  [Timeline]

We also used Data to compare performance of two students from the group. Initially we tried to use the existing data by applying filters and selecting two students, but on being unable to do so we created a separate table and entered the marks for three years. We then selected timeline from the visualization menu.

The problem we faced was that we had not selected the type of the column in which we entered marks as number, but had kept it as text. the heading of the column was the name of the student and the entries were marks, ignoring the nature of the entries and getting confused by the heading name we kept the type as text before finally realizing it.

4. Age Groups of Students in MACJ [Pie Chart]