Lab 1

I enjoyed many of the exercises in the “Learning to See” chapter of Observe, Collect, Draw! including the emotion through shape exercise and the rhythms of the body. These allowed me to be creative and present data in ways that I would not normally think about. I was surprised to find that the exercise that I struggled with the most was the drawing as measuring exercise. I like structure and routine; however, I found this exercise a little tedious and time consuming. I found that drawing a spiral for three minutes and small circles for five minutes difficult (not to mention that my hand cramped).

If I was to create a schema for the vacation log, I would create a bar graph that represents the number of stops at a specific location. For example, I would utilize symbols for each location including rest stops, gas stops, food stops, restroom/potty stops, etc. I would then log the number of stops in each category by using lines/ticks. To complete the bar graph, the symbols would represent the horizontal values of the graph and the number of stops in each category would represent the vertical values completing a bar of different heights for each category.

The three exercises that I will be completing for the Data Diaries project will be Exercise 2 (Birthdays), 15 (My Swearing), and 18 (Distractions).

 

Lab 1

  • I chose the exercise listed below because I struggled to focus on keeping track of my breathing, blinking, and pulse while also trying to mark the text.
  • For my schema I would set up categories that create a distinction between the various types of stops such as gas, food, lodging, etc and then collect the amount of time spent participating in each activity for the duration of the trip. I think this bar graph that I made to represent said schema is pretty cool so I linked it below also.
  • Finally, the three exercises I am going to participate in are #10 my past, #15 my swearing,  and #22 what I eat.

 

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Lab 1

Morgan and I sorted the data we received by the danger of every given stop. 80% we deemed safe, 15% was 50/50, and 5% was actually dangerous. We made a pie chart that showed this. I was pretty confused, at first, as to what I needed to do with the data. This was because I had no idea how to creatively represent the data or what schema to place on it in order to organize/ make sense of it. The exercise I wanted to highlight was the one trying to draw emotion through simple shapes. The idea is to project emotional states back onto a variety of shapes and see how creative one can be. I am not very creative, so it was pretty difficult for me to get the hang of it. Overall, I thought it was interesting, and by the end of this class in December, I hope I can at least a little bit more creative. For my data dairies project that I have to do, one of the projects that I will be doing is the “#6 My Books”. I do not have a very large amount of books, especially not down here in Tuscaloosa, but I really do enjoy reading. I think it would be cool to have all my books mapped out on paper. The second exercise is the “#17 My Inbox” which is the most interesting to me out of the three that will take 1 day. Third is the “#18 Distractions”, which will take 5 days. I would like to do this one just to help with my time management.

Lab 1

  1. The spiral exercise was the most challenging exercise for me.  The first two parts were more straightforward due to less time but it was interesting to see what could be done with more time and constant attention to the drawing.

2.  The schema we created looked at the comparison of time spent doing something safe versus something potentially dangerous. It was split up into three categories; safe, neutral, and dangerous.  We then color-coded each event on the timeline with a corresponding color. After this, we broke it up into percentages and then a pie chart to see the visual data.

3. I will be doing #7(my favorite painter), #16 (my time alone), #18 (my distractions)

Lab 1

The exercise I had the hardest time with was the drawing emotions with shapes because with some of them I struggled with trying to figure out how to show the emotion within the drawing.

The schema I would create with the travel log would be trying to find out how much time of the trip was spent doing various activities or being at certain places. I would create seven categories, six of which would correspond to the entries of the stops like food and drink, supply stops, gas stations, hotels and Airbnb, time spent parked or at rest stops, and then a miscellaneous category that would include entries that did not fit well into the other categories. The seventh category would be time spent driving.

The three exercises I will do for the data diaries assignment are #06 My books, #17 My inbox, and #22 What I eat.

 

Data Lab1

These are the two exercises that stood out to me. The one on the left challenged my creativity, especially the “impatient star”. The exercise in the picture on the right, “Drawing as Measuring”, was challenging for me because I am naturally lazy. Drawing little circles for five minutes straight made me feel like I was going crazy, same with the spirals. I did miss class so I may be off base here. For a schema for a travel log, I would make one including the location traveled to including a picture (if available), how long the stay was, where the person traveled from, and where they went next. I think the best way to show this would be a star type shape, with paths branching out from a central base with the hope that it would avoid too much redundancy. Finally, for my data diaries project, I will be using the following exercises: #3, #6, and #28.

Lab 12 – Questions of Words

Today is our last lab and we are going to end by applying some computational algorithms to words.

Your reading for today was a blog post by Ted Underwood talking about the ways text analysis can be used in humanities research. Key point: Text mining is, at the root, counting words and identifying patterns in the ways words are used. What are the different ways Underwood identifies that we can use our word counts?

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Lab 11 – Mapping Data

Alright everyone! Welcome back.

I hope you enjoyed your 48 hours of data visualizations, many of which involved maps and all of which communicated lots of uncertainty.

My plan for today is to talk briefly about making maps as a type of visualization in Tableau, maps that are models vs maps that are descriptive (which shaped some of the election visualizations that I assume you saw.)

I also want to talk about using maps (and other visualizations) as part of digital storytelling, looking outside of Tableau for a little bit.

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Lab 10 – Graphing Data II

We are going to change up our plan a little for the labs. We will come back to mapping next week, bumping our other forms of analysis down a week.

You each did great experimenting with the visualizations, and I think we could do with a little more time with Tableau and with the charts. So, today we are going to talk through the graphs you made as well as think about other ways to represent the data.

For new things, we are going to walk through how to create dashboards and stories and talk about what they are useful for. We will also walk through how to publish your work onto Tableau Online to the course server and then embed a view into your website.

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