Updates and Data Viz

Erm. busy, busy.

So I am taking a Data Viz class and I will probably be focusing on that for my blog this semester, seeing as my research is hardly ready to be seen!

In my class we have to do a visual journal. cool. I am supposed to record images daily and respond to them. cool. So I will do that here. Plus, I will include you in my reflections on some of the readings for the course. Bear in mind this is totally reflective and personal. Be kind.

What do you think is the main point of this study?

The main point of this paper is to talk about the transformation that occurs when you write something down. The main point is the idea that the act of writing/creation transforms our thoughts. When we write something down, we process our ideas, and it makes our own thoughts available to us, in a way that is impossible when they are still in our head. This paper suggests that the simplest way to benefit from this idea is to simply write, sketch or doodle our ideas. By externalizing them we can view them, critique them and improve them. In order to improve our ideas, it is best to develop them to the point where they are ready to share with others, as in a presentation or a paper. When we consider others we organize the ideas better and we can understand them ourselves. Writing, and reading your own thoughts is like a loop, where you become a third party to your own thoughts and you can see them in a new way. You can use writing to think.

A. Dix (2008). Externalisation – how writing changes thinking .Interfaces, 76, pp. 18-19. Autumn 2008. http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/externalisation-2008/

What practical use can you make of the contents of the paper?

This study could be used as a description of the sketching processes, and a way to describe or examine ones own sketching practice. The study looks at data sketching and identifies a possible connection between abstract representations and analysis of the data, suggesting that as we do visualizations we can experiment with the level of abstraction in our work and the amount of analysis we are doing. It also suggests the benefits of sketching, in that it helps us understand data. It also helps us categorize data visualizations into a range from "value level" to "dimension level" to "Global level", and know the strengths and weaknesses of each. We might stat with value level sketches and work towards dimension and global level sketches, ensuring the analysis we are doing is supported by the data. Sketching also leads to diversity of ideas and this paper shows that even those who are not practiced at sketching can do data visualizations to elucidate data sets.

Jagoda Walny, Samuel Huron and Sheelagh Carpendale. An Exploratory Study of Data Sketching for Visual Representation. Computer Graphics Forum, 34(3) The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015.