Managing Statistics
Citebase provides a number of different analyses of citation and usage (hits/downloads) data. Part of the problem with this is how to provide a reasonable way to access disparate and relatively complex information. In re-designing Citebases interface I've introduced two new features that will hopefully make using its statistical data easier.
As you can see in the image these two new features are tabbed-navigation of the various citation-based navigations and usage breakdowns (using javascript + iframes). The highlighted (in red) is a "sparkline" that gives a very compact indication of the citation history. I'm not sure if this is the creator of sparklines, but I've borrowed the concept from Edward Tufte - see Ask E.T.: Sparklines. While my implementation is definitely 'cool' it would be nice to use the final point technique (the little red dot on Tufte's examples) as well, but I've not thought of how to utilise that for citations (where the neighbouring number is the total citations, which would necessitate having a cumulative graph (99% of which would be a straight line on such a small scale). Perhaps when Citebase goes live someone will come up with an inspired suggestion.
It's surprising just how much better Citebase looks when the spacing is fixed (subscript and superscript as used in formulas ordinarily cause the HTML line spacing to vary). Along with improvements to the abbreviating code and a general increase in images (to make more curved and shadowed space) I think it looks pretty spiffy.
Now I have the user registration code and statistical graphing stuff left to do.
As you can see in the image these two new features are tabbed-navigation of the various citation-based navigations and usage breakdowns (using javascript + iframes). The highlighted (in red) is a "sparkline" that gives a very compact indication of the citation history. I'm not sure if this is the creator of sparklines, but I've borrowed the concept from Edward Tufte - see Ask E.T.: Sparklines. While my implementation is definitely 'cool' it would be nice to use the final point technique (the little red dot on Tufte's examples) as well, but I've not thought of how to utilise that for citations (where the neighbouring number is the total citations, which would necessitate having a cumulative graph (99% of which would be a straight line on such a small scale). Perhaps when Citebase goes live someone will come up with an inspired suggestion.
It's surprising just how much better Citebase looks when the spacing is fixed (subscript and superscript as used in formulas ordinarily cause the HTML line spacing to vary). Along with improvements to the abbreviating code and a general increase in images (to make more curved and shadowed space) I think it looks pretty spiffy.
Now I have the user registration code and statistical graphing stuff left to do.
posted by Tim at
4:45 pm
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