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A 12-post collection

Week 12

May 15
  • The Final Crit
Submitting your work
  • By midnight on the evening of May 22nd (one week from today), you must email me documentation for all three of your projects from the semester:
  • Project documentation should take the form of PDFs, JPEGs, Videos, and URLs to project webpages. Web work should also be represented in the form of screenshots or the like for future-proofness.
  • In addition, I still haven't received Presentation files from most of you. Please send both a PDF and a Powerpoint/Keynote/etc. file. If your talk consisted of web links, please submit the list of URLs in a text file.

Week 8

April 17
Assignment
  • Bring in final Uncharted work as a fully realized piece or exhaustive set of mock-ups
  • Focus your final project onto a single direction and collect all the relevant data you'll need for it. Have a pencil sketch-level conception of its final form.
  • Read Kieran Healy’s review article on how data graphics are used in the actual sciences (circa 2014). Post discussion questions using the tag R7

Week 7

April 10
Assignment
  • Bring in a prototype of your final Uncharted project using the data you've extracted from your source visualization.
  • Read Connecting with the Dots and post discussion questions with the R6 tag

Week 2

February 27
  • Presentations
  • PlotDevice Q&A
  • PlotDevice exercises
    • experiment with the size and background commands to control the ‘canvas’
    • draw a rectangle (rect) and a circle (oval)
    • draw a grid of shapes (either manually or using the grid command)
    • use the poly command to draw a series of regular polygons (triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon) and label each using the text command
    • set the background color using hex-strings, RGB values, and color names
    • use the fill command to change the ‘ink’ color and draw shapes with various levels of grey
    • experiment with adding an additional 'opacity' argument when setting a fill and note how overlapping shapes become translucent
    • try using different blend modes to affect how overlapping colors are combined
    • set a stroke color to outline shapes
    • use the radius argument to the poly and arc commands to draw a series of concentric circles/squares
    • try using the random command to choose positions, sizes, colors, etc.
    • use the WIDTH and HEIGHT constants with random to choose coordinates that will be visible on the canvas
    • draw a smiley face using a combination of arcs and polygons
Assignment
  • develop 3 different ideas for the A Thousand Suns project.
  • read National Geographic article (and post 3 discussion questions using the tag ‘R2’)

Week 1

February 20
  • Assessment of student skills, levels, and interests
    • What do you want to learn in this class?
    • What sorts of data/information graphics work have you done previously?
    • Any coding experience?
  • Introduction to course goals and expectations
  • Intro talk
  • Exercise: Catalog & Classify
    • Create and publish a new post and assign it the tag “catalog” in the gear menu.
    • Describe your chosen visualization type in terms of the kinds of values it represents (e.g., fractions, integers, percentages, etc.) and the sorts of comparisons it enables or discourages.
    • Include 3 images demonstrating ‘good’ uses of this visualization type.
    • Include 3 images demonstrating ‘bad’ uses and describe why they are less successful.
    • Consult the Markdown Guide to help you format your text & images.
Assignment
  • Refine your Catalog entry based on the class discussion and see if you can find additional examples (with an emphasis on the ‘good’ uses of the form).
  • Next week we'll have an in-class programming workshop. In preparation for that, please read this selection of tutorial chapters.
  • As with every reading assignment, you will be expected to post 3 questions to the class blog the night before the next class meeting to help guide our in-class discussion. Be sure to add the tag "R1" to your post by clicking on the gear icon at the top of the screen.