Assignment 1: Visualization Critiques

From Visualization Sp06

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Assignment Due: Jan 31, 2006


Image:StockChart.png

The use of visualization is pervasive in the media: explanatory diagrams in magazines, graphs describing the projected impact of a new state budget, new experimental data plotted against theoretical expectations, etc. In each case, the author of the visualization tries to convey a point of view by emphasizing some aspects of the data while toning down other aspects. The result can vary widely, from informative to misleading.

For this assignment, pick out two examples, one good and one bad visualization, from any of the following sources:

  • Textbook
  • Science magazine (Nature, Science, Scientific American, ...)
  • Magazine or newspaper (Newsweek, The Economist, NY Times, USA Today, ...)

No visualization or information visualization textbook or paper may be used. Go to original sources used by practitioners and researchers. For this assignment, please do not use examples pulled from the web.

Once you have selected a good and a bad example, add a new page to the class wiki that includes both pictures and a description  for each one consisting of 3 parts:

  • Explanation
    Describe the story behind the visualization. What does the visualization show and who is the intended audience? The explanation should be brief but contain enough detail for a non-expert to understand the visualization.
  • Deconstruction
    What data model, image model and encodings are used in the visualization? How large is the data set? Are there any uninformative elements?
  • Critique
    Is the visualization effective? Does it communicate the data? Why or why not? Does the visualization uphold or violate any important design principles? Keep in mind not only perceptual and data-presentation issues, but also the expected background knowledge and cultural conventions of the intended audience. How would you change the visualization to improve it?

Be specific, and include criteria such as accessibility, clarity, accuracy, or any other criterion about the design of the visualization that you feel is important. Your assignment must be posted to the wiki before class on January 31, 2006.

Here are a few examples from the class I taught last year at UW. Note that the assignment was slightly different last year - deconstructions of the visualizations were not required last year.

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How to create your wiki page

Begin by creating a new wiki page for this assignment. The title of the page should be of the form:

A1-FirstnameLastname.

Replace Firstname and Lastname with your real first and last names. You can create the page by entering a url of the following form into your browser:

http://eyeball.cs.berkeley.edu/cs294-10-sp06/A1-FirstnameLastname

To upload images to the wiki, first create a link for the image of the form [[Image:image_name.jpg]] (replacing image_name.jpg with a unique image name for use by the server). This will create a link you can follow that will then allow you to upload the image. Alternatively, you can use the "Upload file" link in the toolbox to upload the image first, and then subsequently create a link to it on your wiki page.

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Add a link to your finished critiques here

One you are finished editing the page, add a link to it here with full name as the link text. The wiki syntax will look like this: *[[A1-FirstnameLastname|Firstname Lastname]]. Hit the edit button for this section to see how I created the link for my name.



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