Data Visualization

My first thought on Matthew Booker’s article “Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Forgotten Past” was, “That’s two questions and one metaphor.” With that said, I do like the metaphor. Booker’s article outlined the interesting geologic and historic history of San Francisco Bay, much of which I was unaware. For our purpose for this seminar, the variety of digital representations spurred a few ideas for me.

I started with Wordle. I cut and paste my third paper prompt, including the rubric. I assumed that the words that would be largest would be “big,” “data,” and probably verbs like “write” and “edit.” Here was the result:

For fun, I then took out the rubric and just looked at the prompt and writing process outline.

I think using this took as a way to have students compare their drafts might be interesting. In first draft stage, it may highlight over-used terms. In final draft, it may allow for some reflection about the content of the essay.

The other tool that I tried was an Infogram line chart. I imagined the use would be a visual representation of some habit such as pleasure reading or social media use. It’s not that impressive, but I guess it’s a start: https://infogr.am/graphing_reading_habits.  I also created a pie chart…Yes, I did pick the low-hanging fruit on this one: https://infogr.am/thursday-42734749. I thought this may be a good visual for breaking down the amount of time students were spending on a particular task (ex. drafting an essay or this week’s homework).

I was going to call it at night when I decided to take a quick look at My Histro. I poked around a little and looked at some interesting projects, but I’m not sure that I see a good use for this tool in ENG 110.

Update 4/28

In reviewing my big data essays this morning, I was reminded of a few TED Talks that I had students watch. They focused around the use of big data to create data visualized art. I am posting them so that I remember that I want to revisit them to consider other ways in which I might use them.