Design Exercise 9: Visualization Hand-Ins

in Design Exercises

Last week, you made rough drafts of the visualizations to turn in this week. This week you turn them in.

The timing of things is altered a bit to allow for peer critique. Hopefully you got good feedback (if you didn’t you might want to come to office hours). The deadline for this handin is set for Friday, not Tuesday, so you have more time to think about the feedback you have gotten. You will turn things in as: DE09: Story Telling With Data (Handin) (due Sun, Nov 20).

Note: there will also be a “survey” for the “next” phase of the assignment. You need to look at Design Exercise 10: Project Proposal, and fill out a survey as DE10A: Project Topics Survey (due Tue, Nov 15).

What to turn in

The assignment and its criteria are described as part of Design Exercise 8: Telling Stories from the ATUS data set. You may want to review that.

Note: there may be additional instructions given in the future.

For each of your four stories / main visualizations you will need to turn in:

  1. A short description of the story. A sentence or two of what you are trying to show. We will ask if it is (1) a story from your DE7, (2) a story from the “class list” (one of the three questions on Atus Class Questions), or (3) one of the “anything goes” stories.
  2. A visualization as a PDF.
  3. A design rationale explaining why you chose the design that you did. What choices did you make to make your story clear?

For your alternate design (it should be a different design for the same question), we will ask:

  1. Which of the previous 4 questions/designs is this the alternate for.
  2. A visualization as a PDF
  3. A comparison of the two. What are the pros and cons of the two designs?

Pick what you think is the “better” of the two designs are the main design (so the alternate is the less good one). But don’t intentionally make a terrible design for the alternate.

Evaluation

Canvas will give you a check/no check for turning this in. We will provide more feedback as a separate element.

Notes for Next Time

  1. Emphasize the question “how does the choice of design and detail help bring out the story?”

  2. Emphasize that charts should stand alone without the reader having to read the explanation.

  3. Emphasize that the ATUS codes are not meant for human consumption.

  4. Emphasize that if you are going to do part whole encodings, you really need to have part whole data.

  5. Something about “null stories”.

  6. Something about effect sizes and outliers and error groups.