Learning from Others: Museums and Design Thinking
Welcome back to Communicating with Data!
Here is Jacqueline Beaule to tell us what we’ve been up to.
We've been doing lots of exciting things like practicing making new types of charts and learning from various speakers. We welcomed Charlene Shang Miller from the Smith College Museum of Art to learn about the process of labeling artwork, or charts in our case, through our visitor's presentation. The skills Charlene shared with us will help give our data visualizations context with informative and engaging labels and captions. This presentation was incredibly helpful as we were working on our Storyboard Project, where we constructed a story in pairs with charts we made using Tidy Tuesday data.
Here is Rose Porta to tell us about first steps in the Storyboard Project
The storyboard "pitch" was the first step toward our storyboard project where in pairs, we will use a Tidy Tuesday dataset to create several plots arranged and described in a way that tells a cohesive story. The story will be generated based on several exploratory questions that we choose. For this first step, we simply created one pivot table in Google Sheets and one plot in Data Wrapper using our data to start our exploration. Each pair also generated 5 questions to potentially explore further.
Some popular datasets include one about college tuition, diversity, and pay and Spotify genres. Stay tuned for some examples of finished products.
What’s a storyboard project you ask? Check out the project description and rubric.
Hear about more guests from Jacqueline
We also learned about design principles and user-centered design from Andrea Bajscy and Emily Norton, and Laura Lillenkamp from the Design Thinking Initiative. Additionally, we created our first interactive visualization in DataWrapper, a table. We learned how to merge two data tables into one (Sara thanks the Twitterverse for tips) and create "sparklines" and "heatmaps." With "sparklines" and "heatmaps," numbers become something real, something we can see, instead of just data collection from a research project that we're disconnected from. These tools create an engagement with viewers by giving them the ability to connect and compare separate points of data.
Emotion themed Dear Data student work curated by Emma Kornberg
Our class, inspired by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data project, has been collecting our own data and creating hand-drawn visualizations from that data nearly every other week. Our most recent Dear Data assignment's theme was emotions, which we were left to interpret however we'd like in our collection and visualization of our themed data. Here are some of our classmates’ submitted Dear Data assignments!
by Anonymous
by Rana Gahwagy
Jacqueline is back to tell us where we are heading.
Moving forward, we have many more exciting things ahead of us to learn and create in our class. Soon we will be using our maker kits, i.e. a kit each student received of physical materials that can be used to craft physical data visualizations, to display data to display data in an accessible and tactile way. Some of the physical objects from our maker kits include different textiles like felt, denim, and faux leather. Additionally, our maker kits include string, a bamboo hoop typically used for embroidery, tacky glue, and clay. These materials will be used to create a data visualization that is user-focused and still tells a powerful story. Stay tuned!
*This newsletter was edited by Emily Grantham and Madison Williams.