Objectives

• Get some hands on experience working with data
• Get you thinking creatively about visualization before you get too familiar with standard techniques

Dear Data

Dear Data was a year long exchange of hand drawn visualizations documenting weekly occurrences. Read about the project at http://www.dear-data.com/theproject/. Then visit the archive of all of the postcards that they produced over the year. Pick at least three representative weeks that look interesting and study them. Look at the keys and try to read the visualization. Then visit the "read more" link and read about their process and thoughts about the week. You can also check out Dear Data Two, another pair of vis folks who decided to do their own year of visualization postcards. Their aesthetic is definitely different and a bit more technical, which can probably be attributed to their backgrounds.

You are going to produce your own personal dataset and draw a custom visualization that reflects it.

Data Collection

We are going to speed up the timeline a little, so instead of collecting a weeks worth of data, I would like you to collect five days worth of data (a full 120 hours). Aim to make at least 20 individual observations (but don't feel restricted to that).

The data you collect should be multivariate (i.e., have more than one piece of information). If you were recording birds you saw, just showing me that you saw twenty birds would not be sufficient. Showing me when you saw those twenty birds and their color and size would be. While the time of the observation does give you a cheap data dimension, don't feel like you have to use it. You could visualize each bird's color, size, and the compass direction they flew off in, or their locations. Think about what might tell the most interesting story (or make the most interesting visual).

I will not dictate how you collect the information. Georgia and Stephanie found using their phones to be the most convenient, but they were thinking in terms of recording information every day for a year. Don't spend a lot of time working out the how. If you just carry a piece of paper around with you for two days, that is fine. At the end of the two days, create a table of your observations. This will make it easier for you to produce the visualization (and you will turn it in).

Your theme is favorite things. You can interpret that however you feel fit.

The Visualization

You should now pick some encodings for each of your variables (hopefully you already know what your variables are). Do not feel constrained to any style of visualization you have seen before. As you can see from the couple of postcards shared by Stephanie and Giorgia, the encodings can be almost anything. The only important thing is that someone could extract the data back out of the visualization.

Along those lines, you will need to provide a key. The key should tell the reader everything she or he needs to be able to interpret your drawing.

The visualization and the key should fit on one side of a single sheet of paper. You can divide the space between the key and the visualization however you like, provided they both fit and can be read. You are welcome to use any implement you like (pencil, pen, marker, colored pencils, paint brush, ruler, protractor, etc...). The only requirement is that it be hand drawn. Also, if you use more than one color, the color should be used to convey information.

Do not stress about your drawing skills. This is not a technical drawing class. As you can see, the Dear Data postcards are not finished works of art. Your goal is to convey information through imagery.

Do make drafts. Your final visualization will be far better if you start by making five rough sketches to see if your idea works than it will if you sit down with ruler and protractor and sweat over a single iteration. Along those lines, while length and size are fine encodings, I am not expecting precision. A perfect, hand-drawn bar chart that I can accurately pull values off with a ruler is not what I am looking for.

Deliverables

I would like you to turn in three things:

• The visualization and key. As I said above, both the visualization and the key should fit on one side of a single sheet of paper. I will be looking for all of the variables to be encoded in some way that I can figure out (roughly) what the observations were (as I said, I do not expect to be able to accurately recover quantitative data). The key should be clear about how the information is encoded. Your encodings should be unambiguous. In other words, while I may not be able to tell if you saw a bird at 1:00 vs 2:00, I should be able to tell the difference between a titmouse and a turkey vulture (whether you encoded size or species).

• The data you collected in tabular form. It should be obvious what the observations were and what variables your collected. This can run to multiple pages if need be (but don't feel the need to produce a novel). I'll be looking for at least 20 observations and several variables.

• A brief reflection about the process. Tell me about the data collection process -- what did you decide to collect, how did you do it, and how did you find the process. Discuss the creation of the visualization. How many drafts did you make? How easy was it to settle on encodings? Finally, provide one insight that can be learned from the visualization. Ideally, this should be something you learned about yourself (or the subject of your visualization) that you didn't know before you created the drawing. Failing that, describe an insight that you hope a viewer would have looking at your visualization.

Please turn in the visualization itself during class on the due date. The other two items can be submitted on Canvas.