Assignment in Digital Humanities. Fall 2018 @ MIT. Group Project
As the final project of the class Digital Humanities, we were to create some digital prototype that used data in an interesting way. We came up with the MIT Major Sorting Hat, a website that, based on your enjoyment of different classes in high school and your overall personality, would provide recommendations for undergraduate majors at MIT. We gathered data from several hundred current and former MIT students to create profiles for each of the majors, which provide the basis for our calculations. The user’s answer to a questionnaire is then compared with each trait in each major profile, and a “distance” to each major is calculated. One can then explore the results further by clicking into a major, seeing how each data point compares with the major profile and reading a short description of the major. For more detailed information, there are also links to the official department websites.
Though we did not have the time to clean up the UI on the working website, it does technically function, and can be found at http://majorsortinghat.herokuapp.com/ . However, it is important to emphasize that the current user experience on this site is very, very sub-par, and that not all the necessary graphical elements were available when building the site (hence, among other things, the placeholder images of Nicolas Cage).
Your closest results are visualized as a spiral, and more info appears up on mouse over. As of right now, there are three different ways of calculating the distance, each with their own pros and cons, which has not really been accounted for in the design of the web page.
When clicking in on a major, you get your results, and how they compare with the major, visualized on top, with more information available on mouse over. You are also supposed to get actual quotes from actual people in the program, but we were unable to obtain that in time, and provide random pictures of Nicolas Cage instead.