From lwaller@sph.emory.edu Wed Jun 28 11:14:08 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA25206 for ; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 11:14:07 -0700 Received: from gator.sph.emory.edu (gator.sph.emory.edu [170.140.4.2]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA18290 for ; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 11:14:06 -0700 Received: from viper.sph.emory.edu (root@viper.sph.emory.edu [170.140.4.1]) by gator.sph.emory.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id e5SIDxr21222; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:13:59 -0400 (EDT) Received: from sph.emory.edu (squid.sph.emory.edu [170.140.4.9]) by viper.sph.emory.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id e5SIDvD01041; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:13:57 -0400 (EDT) Sender: lwaller@sph.emory.edu Message-ID: <395A4061.1C92ED8@sph.emory.edu> Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:13:53 -0400 From: Lance Waller X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.7 sun4u) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: waphgis@u.washington.edu, "Andrew B. Barclay" , Aila Sarkka , vbs6@cdc.gov Subject: Re: Animation References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I guess it's fair to critique, constructive criticism helps. I should say that this is work in progress and not a final product, so you may be expecting more from it than it really has to offer. In fact, the animation is mostly for us to get a feel for what is going on in the data, not as a release on a web atlas. We're ("We" = Vishnu-Priya Sneller at CDC, me, Aila Sarkka, and Andy Barclay at Emory) writing a paper on the Hep B application this summer/fall. There should be two color schemes available on the web site. Personally, I don't like either one of them (see Monmonier's "How to Lie with Maps" book and the chapter on color...spectrum color ordering is not the easiest to interpret), I prefer blue to red (cold to hot) shades, but the ones we used were automatic, available, and served our purpose. *If* this were part of a web atlas, I agree we should fix the titles, add a slider bar, etc. (and make sure it works on Internet Explorer). For now, it lets us look at the data and is an example of animating health maps. How did we do it? We created the intensity surfaces for point locations using R (a freeware version of S-plus), fed in census tract boundary polygons from an ArcView shapefile, made a map for each year and saved them as GIF files. Java code reads in each figure sequentially and cycles through them (just a fancy flip-movie). Andy used some Java toolboxes to insert the Stop and Restart buttons (since Microsoft isn't crazy about a device independent language like Java...maybe it doesn't work in IE5). So basically you make your maps, save them as images, then use Java to animate them. Not practical if you're animating 5 years worth of weekly data (unless you have more storage than I do), but it worked for our purposes. This certainly isn't supposed to be a perfect, polished example but I thought it might add to the discussion to have some sort of animation example. I should stress again, that any pattern you see in the maps is a combination of pop'n density, disease density, and reporting practices. We could adjust for pop'n density, but we don't have any data on each dr/hospital's probability of reporting a case other than to know that it was very variable over the study period. (Which is a shame, since the reporting rate necessarily filters any pattern in the disease incidence and makes it difficult to conclude whether the patterns in the data are "real" or not...all we see is a pattern of reported cases, if reporting is the same everywhere this should match the pattern of incidence, if reporting varies from place to place, we see a filtered pattern). Any other comments are appreciated, Lance Marjorie Roswell wrote: > > Is it fair to "critique"? > > well, not to wait for an answer: some aspect of the animation I like, and > some I don't. > > The overall sense of animated data is "cool." > > I like the contours. > > The colors are "cool." > > (But I didn't like the use of dark green for the lowest intensity, and > red for middle intensity.) > > It's hard to read the graphic text on my screen resolution (1024 x 768) > > Edward Tufte's section on animation is well worth reading in his book > "Visual Explanations" (page 20). He wouldn't approve of the changing 1996 > 1997 1998 1999 etc... Actually, I didn't even see it there, for the > longest time. > > Better to have a progress bar, essentially, keyed with the years > underneath. > > Also, the stop/restart buttons in the page didn't work. (though now I see > that they works in Netscape, but not my copy of IE5.) > > I better watch out. I'm sure folks'll be ruthless if I ever get this lyme > animation done! > > What software did you use for this animation? I want to try it too! > > Margie > > On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Lance Waller wrote: > > > For an example using Dade County and animation (two of > > Marjorie's original questions!) see > > > > http://www.sph.emory.edu/~abarcla/dade/ > > > > For maps of Hepatitus B cases 1984, 1986-1990 based on > > some work with CDC. > > > > I should note that these data are from a passive surveillance > > system (i.e. Drs/hospitals are supposed to report cases, but > > there is not follow-up to see who actually reports) so any > > patterns you see are a mixture of (a) population density, > > (b) disease pattern, and (c) reporting practices. With > > respect to (c) we have separate animations for cases reported > > by private physicians and cases reported by hospitals. .