Lab 4 Writeup
Tucker Craig
10/05/2017

1. Why do you want to use continuous ratio data for parallel coordinates? How would you plot categorical data as one of your axes in parallel coordinates, and why is this a challenge?

We use continuous ratio data for parallel coordinates because there is a scale and clear order to the continuous numbers. Categorical data is nice, and could be used, if you have a list of names of something. Like Subjects from our WebTree data. It would be hard because you would have to have whatever you wanted in some sort of order with clear intervals between each arbitrary tick in the parallel axis. Also each tick would need a specific label for which category it represents. You could use the left-most axis to avoid that problem, though.

2. Clearly justify your colormap choice for your data.

I chose my Ordinal color because I want to color based on time, which is ordinal, and I want to show a progression from day to night. I then made 8 subsections because I wanted to look at sections of time that are 3 hours each. That means there would be 8 different colors because 24/3 = 8. I chose this scale, with 3 colors, over others with two because I want the distinction between sections to be clear.