Design Challenge 2

For Design Exercise 11 and 12, we ask you to pick 4 “questions” or “stories” to tell from the ATUS data (that you’ve been working with for the past few weeks). For one of these stories, you will submit an “alternate” design (hence, 5 visualizations).

For Design Exercise 11, you turn in a “draft” - saying what questions/stories you intend to make visualizations for, and drafts of those visualizations. For Design Exercise 12, you turn in a set of “final” visualizations, with rationales.

Unlike last week, when all the visualizations were exploratory, here they are meant to be “final” - they should stand alone (with good labels and captions). You are asked to turn in a “rationale” (why you think it is effective, what you think it shows), but the visualization should “work” without it.

You will turn this assignment in using the Canvas survey Design Exercise 10: My Questions - Your Questions (due Fri, Nov 08). While the assignment is due on Friday, November 8th, we will accept assignments until Monday, November 11th without penalty.

This is the first assignment in a series of design exercises where you will work with the ATUS Data for 765-24.

The goals for this assignment are for you to (1) get some experience with the data set, (2) to practice making visualizations from it, (3) to do some exploratory visualization from it, and to (4) think about some of the issues particular to this data set.

If you haven’t already done so, I recommend reading the ATUS Data for 765-24 page to get started. I also recommend that you look through A Quick EDA Example with the ATUS Data (from 2022) - this is an example of me playing with the data sets from 2 years ago (which were different).

For the Design Exercises 9-12, we are giving students the opportunity to be part of a collaborative learning opportunity. Students must opt-in: by agreeing to be part of option, students will be held responsible for strict deadlines twice a week. In return, they will receive the ability to work in a group to discuss their assignments (asynchronously).

Note: even if you want to opt out (i.e., not opt-in) you must complete CLO Survey: Opt in or out to the Collaborative Learning Opportunity - it does count as a class survey. You must register your choice by 2pm (an hour after class) on Monday, October 28th.

The American Time Usage Survey is a big data collection effort from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS (BLS).

The survey collects detailed time usage data (how people spend their time) for a sampling of people across the US.

They provide the data files in a very detailed form: data files page. You can get lots of information about who the people are and what they did.

One thing that makes this data interesting is that it is done with a great deal of statistical care to document each thing very carefully so that it can be used correctly.

Design Challenge 2 (or maybe, better described as “Data Challenge 2”) will be a grouping of assignments (Design Exercises) we will do over the next few weeks. The idea is we will use a single data set (the American Time Usage Survey - see ATUS Data for 765-24) for a number of exercises involving exploring data, identifying questions, designing visualizations, and critiquing visualizations.