A wide
variety of digital tools have been designed to help users visually
explore data sets and confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about the data.
The task in this assignment is to use an existing software tool
(Tableau) to formulate and answer a series of specific questions about a
data set of your choice. After answering the questions you should
create a final visualization that is designed to present the answer to
your question to others. You should maintain a notebook that documents
all the questions you asked and the steps you performed from start to
finish. The goal of this assignment is not to develop a new
visualization tool, but to understand better the process of exploring
data using an off-the-shelf visualization tool. Documenting the
data analysis process you went through is the main pedagogical goal of
the assignment and more important than the design of the final
visualization.
Here is one way to start.
Step 1. Pick a domain that you are interested in.
Some
good possibilities might be the physical properties of chemical
elements, the types of stars, or the human genome. Feel free to use an
example from your own research, but do not pick an example that you
already have created visualizations for.
Step 2. Pose an initial question that you would like to answer.
For
example: Is there a relationship between melting point and atomic
number? Are the brightness and color of stars correlated? Are there
different patterns of nucleotides in different regions in human DNA?
Step 3. Assess the fitness of the data for answering your question.
Inspect
the data – it is invariably helpful to first look at the raw values.
Does the data seem appropriate for answering your question? If not, you
may need to start the process over. If so, does the data need to be
reformatted or cleaned prior to analysis? Perform any steps necessary to
get the data into shape prior to visual analysis.
You will need to iterate through these steps a few times. It may be
challenging to find interesting questions and a dataset that has the
information that you need to answer those questions. You may need to try
several datasets.
Exploratory Analysis Process
After you have an initial question and a dataset, construct a
visualization that provides an answer to your question. As you construct
the visualization you will find that your question evolves – often it
will become more specific. Keep track of his evolution and the other
questions that occur to you along the way. Once you have answered all
the questions to your satisfaction, think of a way to present the data
and the answers as clearly as possible. In this assignment, you should
use an existing visualization software tool (Tableau). You may find it
beneficial to use more than one tool.
Before starting, write down the initial question clearly. And, as you
go, maintain a notebook (e.g. a Google or Word document) of what you
had to do to construct the visualizations and how the questions evolved.
Include in the notebook where you got the data, and documentation about
the format of the dataset. Describe any transformations or
rearrangements of the dataset that you needed to perform; in particular,
describe how you got the data into the format needed by the
visualization system. Keep copies of any intermediate visualizations
that helped you refine your question. After you have constructed the
final visualization for presenting your answer, write a caption and a
paragraph describing the visualization, and how it answers the question
you posed. Think of the figure, the caption and the text as material you
might include in a research paper.
Data Sets
You should look for data sets online in convenient formats such as
Excel or a CSV file. The web contains a lot of raw data. In some cases
you will need to convert the data to a format you can use. Format
conversion is a big part of visualization research so it is worth
learning techniques for doing such conversions. Although it is best to
find a data set you are especially interested in, here are pointers to a
few datasets:
Awesome Public Datasets (https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets)
Data is Plural (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/edit#gid=0)
Visualization Software
To create the visualizations, we will be using Tableau (https://www.tableau.com/), a commercial visualization tool that supports many different ways to interact with the data. Tableau has offers free student licenses (https://www.tableau.com/academic/students)
so that you can install the software on your own computer. One goal of
this assignment is for you to learn to use and evaluate the
effectiveness of Tableau. Please talk to me if you think it won’t be
possible for you to use the tool. In addition to Tableau, you are free
to also use other visualization tools as you see fit.
Tableau for Students (https://www.tableau.com/academic/students)
GGplot2 (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/)
GGobi (http://ggobi.org/)
Improvise (https://www.cs.ou.edu/~weaver/improvise/index.html)
Grading
Each submission will be graded based on both the analysis process and included visualizations. Here are our grading criteria:
Exploration Thoroughness (6): Sufficient breadth of
analysis, exploring questions in sufficient depth (with appropriate
follow-up questions). Appropriate data quality assessment and
transformation.
Documentation (6): Clear documentation of exploratory process, including justification for pivots in approach and intermediate visualizations.
Final Visualization (3): Clearly designed final visualization communicating final insights with understandable captions and annotations.
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