Due: 2014-03-11 11:00a
For this assignment, please work with a partner. I think you will have more fun bouncing ideas off of one another, and for the last question it will be essential that there are two of you. I want this is be truly collaborative, so you should be critiquing together and writing up together. I don’t want you to just divide the assignment down the middle and each do separate problems. It is okay if you both critique, and the result is a collection of notes and then you divide the typing, but I don’t want full separation. Also, it is possible that you will have dissenting ideas. Don’t feel you have to come to a consensus. If you don’t agree, write both opinions down and attribute them appropriately.
[5 points] Take a look at the visualization in this article from the Wall Street Journal. While it is a simple histogram, it is not entirely honest. What is the problem?
[5 points] Here is a visualization from boxofficequant.com. Critique it. [Note that I said critique, not criticize. I am not saying if this is good, bad or somewhere in between. I want you to look at it with a critical eye and point out what works, what doesn’t, and if there are things that don’t how to address them.]
[5 points] Take a look at NPR’s Map of the U.S. Electric Grid. Critique it.
[5 points] Many of you are proving adept at finding poor visualizations. Find one and describe what makes it poor. I don’t want any shooting fish in a barrel, so no pie charts that don’t add up to some reasonable total, and try to do it without hitting up WTF Visualizations.
[20 points] Return to homework 1. Pick the worst of your visualizations (using your new critical eye, not one that just didn’t show anything because you were exploring the data). Critique the visualization and then redo it. Since you are working with partners, that means you should do two of these.
Use whatever tool you feel the most comfortable with to write up solutions to these problems. However, you must convert the document to PDF before turning it in. Name the file username1_username2_hw3.pdf. Only one of the pair needs to submit.
I would like this document turned in in the DROPBOX on MiddFiles. You can refer to the reference on the LIS wiki to help you connect to the file server.
