Today’s Plan:
- Visualization Project
- What Don’t I mean by Visualization
- What I Think Maybe Possibly the Final Expectations Probably Won’t Be Unless They Are
- Homework
Additional Visualization Resources
- Visualization Periodic Table
- Vengage: How to Visualize and Article
- A Framework for Externalizing Implicit Error Using Visualization
Visualization Project
Today I want to introduce a Visualization Project. At a general level, this project asks that you visualize some data. The exact nature of this visualization will change radically based on the kind of project you develop.
Previously, when I taught a Visual Rhetoric and Document Design course, I included an Infographic project. This is when infographics were new and shiny. I don’t think they are anymore. There are elements of infographics that are relative here–let’s look at some. Let’s look at some better ones. Finally, let’s look at a video infographic. Okay, maybe one more.
Why am I steering away from infographics? First, there’s a variety of free or almost-free software and apps out there that focus on infographs. Second, because I want this course to prepare you for the professional world, I’d like you to design something a bit more professional. Third, I want you to design this professional thing in Instagram. Fourth, I want you to pay some money and get this thing printed professionally (I’ll have more info on costs soon).
My inspiration for this project came as I was sitting in the waiting room of my Subaru Dealership. They had this thing on a few tables. I thought “hey, this would be a cool thing for people to make.” But here’s the thing–I want you to make a visualization of something you like. Something interesting. Something, perhaps, unexpected. This last criteria is especially problematic, because unless you are a particular kind of nerd (read: me) you probably don’t pay a lot of attention to visualizations. It is unlikely you are too familiar with all the different stuff that nerds visualize, and/or the ways in which they do it. So let’s take a look.
What Don’t I Mean By Visualization
Here are some visualizations that I have saved while navigating the web. Some are recent, some are not.
- Climate Change is Real and Caused by Humans and Don’t Challenge Me on This I’m Not in the Mood for Nonsense
- Climate Change Con’t
- Death of Motor City
- CDC, Facial Hair, Coronavirus
- Healthcare not Radical
- What Can/Can’t We Afford
- Tracking Voter Donations
- Who Should You Vote For?
- A Responsible Way to Compare Candidates
- A Less Responsible Way to Compare Candidates
- Every Sample in the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique
- Choose Your Own Adventure Games
- What if you visualized Game of Thrones?
- People Die in Game of Thrones
- Assassin’s Creed as infographic
- How to Tell You Are Reading a Gothic Novel
- What about movies?
- How Much Football is Even in a Football Game?
- Periodic Table
- Visualization of Rome as a Subway
- Sports
- Sports and Maps
- Tracking a Statistic Over Time
- Visualize a Player’s Career
- Powerful Mashups (doubt this would work but cool enough to show)
- Could this become a project?
Maybe you want an easy assignment. Cool. Here is a link to government data. Take some data. Turn it into a 6-8 page presentation that echoes the Subaru presentation above.
That presentation should include at least on page of textual research and description, one graph, one chart, and one other kind of visualization.
What I Think Maybe Possibly the Final Expectations Probably Won’t Be Unless They Are
Here’s my struggle: I don’t want to get in the way of letting you do what you want to do. At the same time, I want to make sure that you do something challenging and valuable. Given all the variables here, it is hard for me to establish specific criteria.
This project will have stages. They are:
- Research and Proposal Memo; Due March 20th. This memo will describe your visualization project for me. It will also contain all the research for your visualization (whether that is statistical data, outlines, collected images, etc). Your research should reflect at least 3-4 hours of work.
- Mock-Ups; Due April 3rd (Google Slides Presentation). This presentation will share your design mock ups. These can be rough Photoshop or InDesign mock ups or simple pictures of crayon drawings. The idea is to show what you have developed between March 20th and April 3rd. The mock ups should reflect 2 hours of work.
- Draft and Memo; Due April 16th (Canvas). You will submit the current state of your project to Canvas, along with a memo that details your progress. This should reflect 3 to 5 hours of work. This can also document technological fails (so long as you have files to prove it).
- Final Project; Due Date TBD. The final project will be accompanied with a Project Postmortem.
I will ask that you keep an activity journal (sometimes called a work log) that tracks the hours you invest in the project. My expectation is that, start to finish, the project should take 13-15 hours, spread out over our remaining two months. Most of this work will be outside of class (in class we will be working on our two book layouts).
As we work on these projects, I will likely ask you to develop what you think is a suitable grading rubric. I will also ask you to assess your performance and grade yourself in the postmortem.
