Name: Abhijit KR

Guide: Prof. Venkatesh Rajamanickam

Course: Interaction

Code: Arihant Parsoya

Shaking the Foundations of an Empire: An Interactive Data Visualisation of the Dandi Salt March

In an act of civil disobedience against the British rule of India and their misappropriation of power, Mahatma Gandhi and 81 fellow satyagrahis marched from Sabarmati to Dandi in Gujarat, breaking the salt law that criminalised domestic manufacture of salt. This project explores the March as a data-centric narrative, from a fresh perspective.

Through interactive data visualisations interpreting data (historical time-lines, distances covered, halts, crowd sizes, number of women, donations from various groups and analysing the content of Gandhi’s speeches along the way), the project celebrates a silent revolutionary spirit and highlights the rich historical context of the March.

The website lives online at keyaar.in/salt. You are invited to relive the march through our retelling in numbers.

The route visualization embraces the context-giving qualities of a map to situate the route in appropriate physical reality. (It uses a satellite image as a background, in other words.) As the user scrolls, the route line thickens, while two counters below update information on distance traveled and an overview of where in Gujarat the current position is. These additional data sets also offset some monotony of the long scroll. The long scroll, while space-consuming, is necessary to communicate the serious effort of the March as well as provide some necessary detail on how the decisions of which route to take were made.

An overview of the project. See it live, at keyaar.in/salt

Each speech is shown as a grey rectangle (height corresponding to the length of the speech, counted in words) arranged in a grid of such rectangles. Nine groups of words are searched and indexed in each of these speeches, with a thin line representing them. The groups of words were chosen after reading through the speeches and Thomas Weber’s account of each day, mentioning specific events that influenced these speeches. On clicking the line, it highlights all instances of that word across all the speeches. This reveals the gist of each speech visually, looking at the multitude of issues Gandhi talked about.