Internet Monitor Dashboard Data-Agnostic Visualization Widgets
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Mentors: Reinhard Engels, Rebekah Heacock Jones
Student: Mariam Maarouf

Purpose

Prior to this project, the Internet Monitor Dashboard's visualizations widgets were all pre-tailored, with the front and back ends tightly coupled (a custom UI for every data source), which made it harder to scale up to new data sources and limited the user's choices to visualize data.

The goal of this project was to make visualization data-agnostic, in the sense that the process of data collection and aggregation was separated from the visualization itself, giving users more visualization options and allowing for a much easier addition of new data sources.

Tasks

• Upgrade & port some of the existing visualization widgets to the new, data-agnostic format.
• Create new visualization widgets.
• Update the back-end to use v2 of the Internet Monitor Platform API.
• Introduce the ability to filter widgets based on available data & display options.

Results

Introduce filtering widgets by data & display

Filter widgets based on how and what they visualize. If a specific country and indicator are picked, the availibility of data factors into the filter. This meant:

• Updating the widget packages metadata to include what they can display.
• Normalize country data for widgets that don't use the Platform API for comparison.