Seek and Finds

in Parts of Class

What: Find a visualization (usually on the web) and post a picture and answer the prompt each week. Each will make a specific request. You are encouraged, but not required, to comment on what other people upload. You are strongly encouraged to at least look at others postings.
Why: Looking at actual examples of visualization will help you connect the concepts of class to real usages. Collecting and looking at a diverse set of examples helps us appreciate the range of where the ideas apply.
When: There will be a seek and find due every week on Friday. The discussion boards will be left open for a week after the assignments are due to allow for discussion.
How: Visualizations will be posted to an online discussion forum on Canvas. Make sure to upload a picture and a link to where it can be found in context. Also, answer any questions in the prompt.
Assessment: we will grade each initial posting empty/unacceptable/acceptable (quantitative) and provide overall grades that look at the quality of multiple weeks of postings (initial postings and discussion). Late Policy: Late postings (of the initial visualization) are accepted, but may be penalized (e.g., if you are consistently very late). Drop Policy: The lowest 2 scores will be dropped.

For this assignment you must bring us a … (data) visualization!

(sorry, this is a reference to an old Monty Python movie – if you don’t know the reference, that line won’t be funny. Even if you do know the reference, it might not be funny).

Each week, we will ask you to bring us a visualization (we will have these seek and find assignments every week). There will usually be some specification of what you need to find. We might ask for a certain kind of data, or an example of the use of a specific technique.

The seek and find ground rules:

  • It cannot be a visualization that you (or someone in class) made.
  • It must be publicly available.
  • You must provide an image. You need to upload the image to Canvas and embed it in your posting. See Tips on Using Canvas (Uploading Images to Canvas). You must upload an image file.
  • If it’s on a web page, you should copy a picture (either use a screen shot or copy the image). Please shrink the image to a reasonable size, if it’s too small for people to see the detail, they’ll be able to get it from the link you give.
  • Try to find something interesting (to you at least)

Create a posting and include a picture of the visualization. If you found the visualization on the web, provide a link to the page that it is on (if it’s hard to find on that page, give some clues like “on page 4 of https://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2015/AG15/Submission-FINAL-7-27-2015.pdf“). If you scanned it or photograph it, describe where you got it from (scanned from p7 of January 6th Capital Times).

Upload an image file. A JPG, PNG or SVG is good. Avoid linking to external images. Do not upload video (take an image snapshot, and include a link to the video). Do not upload a webpage (again, take a snapshot).

Try to pick something that you don’t think anyone else will pick. Even though you can peek and see what others are posting, someone might post at the same time as you, so try to avoid redundancy although this isn’t a strict rule.

You are encouraged to discuss other people’s submissions (you are allowed to comment on canvas). Discussion is not required. However, students often find it interesting to look at what everyone else has turned in, and to discuss by replying to the postings. At the end of class, we will consider your overall online participation as part of your grade.

Because a discussion with 50+ people can become unwieldy, we will divide the class into groups.

These are graded just as Online Discussions are: we will give a quantitative grade (empty/unacceptable/acceptable) for every seek and find. We will give a grade to groups of assignments.