Two outcomes from the same project brief during my study period in the Netherlands. Islands Of Emotional Discord is about the disarray of the emotional factors in Romeo and Juliet, and the D3.Java Interactive Data Visualization follows the main character Romeo and his impact on the story.

Islands of emotional discord is a data visualisation using the original text of the classic Shakespearean play Romeo & Juliet. Throughout the play various events unfold, both positive and negative, but all of these events and the moments inbetween have an emotional context and value. Seeing all of the turbulent emotional changes within the play inspired me to create a map of abstract landforms which are informed directly by these emotions in a vivid and dream-like style.

The brief was to take this traditional text and to produce a visualisation from it, this could be any subject which was relevant within Romeo & Juliet, for example if you had decided to create a visualisation around how many times the word "Death" is used and where you could. It was a rather open brief but it wasn't difficult to manage, the first stage of the project was spent purely thinking things through and sketching profusely to try to adequately represent the emotions in the text. Because of the shapelessness of the emotions I decided the best way forward was to treat them as variables, to have them shape a visual device rather than have them become the device. This is the train of thought that resulted in the emotions building a map of elements; each island represents an act and the emotions dictate what direction the land-triangles are moving in every half-page.