Our last week! (really - since there is nothing during exam week).

We’re close to the end… just 2 more weeks. And so much that I want to do (but reality is setting in). You’ve seen the plan in the End Game posting. The list of what’s left is short enough that “this week” shows everything…

Thanks to everyone who took the DE12 post-mortem survey. It was quite interesting for me. It gives me a lot of food for thought on how to improve things - even though it is too late to make changes for this year.

(although, it does re-assure me that some of my last minute changes were good)

If you’re curious, here are the survey results (and my takeaways)…

Critiques

About giving critiques…

We are getting near the end of the semester, here is the plan for what we are doing. The big thing is the announcement of DE15: DE6 Do-Over. Everything else, you can probably guess.

For this design exercise, you get to fix your submission for DE06: One Data Set, Four Stories (Census Data Edition) and submit it again.

It’s Thanksgiving week - which makes for an unusual week, since Thursday and Friday are holidays. And the day before Thanksgiving always feels a little different (we will have class). We’ll celebrate by having something unusual. And thinking about how the remaining time unfolds…

In class, we will try to work a bit on our skills as “designers” (in the sense of graphic design). Design skills are useful beyond visualization - you will probably need to make presentation slides, posters, web pages, business cards (OK, maybe that’s archaic), … So I wanted to take some time in class so we can work on our skills (yes - me too).

I used to call this “Design School in a Day” - except that it isn’t just a day (it will be a day of class, and a week of “homework”), and it’s hard to glorify this as a “school”.

You have gotten (or will get very soon) your grade for DE6. It will be in a separate Canvas column.

We graded it on an A-F scale. Your grade is given as the “GPA number” (4=A, 3.5=AB, 3=B, 0=F). We do this to make it easier for later averaging. And so that we can divide things a little more finely than the “whole half-grade steps.”

You can convert things to a letter grade by rounding (e.g., 3.7 rounds to 3.5, which is an AB). But you should also interpret it as “3.7 is an AB, but really close to the border”. Being close is significant because of how it might be combined with other assignments later, but also so you know with a little bit of fixing, it could have been an A.

A mix of things inter-related things. Advice for DE12, DE6 grades, future assignments, etc.

DE12 is due Friday, with no penalty if you turn things in by Monday (November 25th).

Some advice (from questions after class, and DE6 grading)…

1. The assignment says “If all of your visualizations are bar charts …” - we do value variety, but we value effectiveness more. If it really is the case that your stories are all told best with the same chart design, then you might have 4 bar charts or scatterplots or … At least your alternate could be different (which might reinforce why the bar chart is the best choice).

   Read more…

The topic for this week is evaluation: how do we know that our visualizations (or visualization systems, or visualization research) is any good. This is a really important topic, which deserves a lot of attention - but since we have the design exercise going on, we’ll need to limit it…