Syllabus Data Communication and Visualization GO · 2014-04-22 · SEA$Semester®:TheGlobalOcean$ $ $$ $ Data$Communication$&$Visualization$@$4$ DataSources$ World$Health$Organization$

SEA Semester®: The Global Ocean

www.sea.edu Data Communication & Visualization -‐ 1

Data Communication & Visualization CAS NS 330 (3 credits) Course Catalog Description (max. 40 words): Information visualization strategies and associated software, emphasizing communication to diverse audiences. Select between geospatial (GIS) and qualitative data foci. Develop graphics and/or multimedia products supporting research projects in concurrent courses. Compile iterative digital portfolio. Instructor(s): Sea Education Association Faculty Location: SEA campus in Woods Hole, MA and at sea on board one of SEA’s sailing school vessels. Prerequisites: Admission to SEA Semester. Sophomore standing or consent of instructor. Course Philosophy and Approach:

Research projects begin with questions, which we attempt to answer through collecting and analyzing information. How we then share our data and conclusions is the subject of this course. Effective and engaging communication skills enable us to convey complex information to a diverse audience both orally and in print. In Woods Hole, students will be introduced to models for organizing information, but will quickly focus on a project that will be pursued with a mentor on the ship and/or in our port stops. The independent research project will culminate in a conference-‐style presentation with effective visuals (charts, graphs, maps and images) in the form of an illustrated lecture or poster, or a written report of publishable quality. The data for this project may come from SEA’s extensive research data, or be generated during the cruise.

This course consists of 11 lecture/discussion sessions on shore (2 hrs each), 6 software work sessions with instructor available (1 hr each), 6 individual portfolio progress review meetings (1 hr each), and a student-‐led presentation session (2 hrs). An additional 20 hrs of guided and supervised project work will complement the formal class meetings. Learning Outcomes: 1. Familiarity with a minimum of three graphs, maps, infographics, matrices and/or

multimedia pieces, and the software fundamentals needed to generate these products. 2. Ability to select the most appropriate information display strategy, accompanying text and

formatting details for a given data objective and audience. 3. Effectively employ a broad range of visual communication techniques in publishable

elements to support and enhance a field research project.

Evaluation: Exercises and Critiques 25% Proof of Concept 25%



Symposium Presentation and Peer Critiques 10% Project Drafts 20% Portfolio 20% Assignments:

Exercises (11): Short practice exercises require that students work with the software and strategies introduced in class, then apply them to new datasets or problems. These assignments occur during the first six weeks of the course between consecutive class sessions.

Critiques (4): Write a short critical analysis of two visualization examples, one you believe to be effective and one you believe to be bad. Describe the effectiveness of the visualization, its most noticeable elements and their relative importance to the story, any essential missing information, elements that carry no information, and suggestions for how the visualization could be improved. Each critique should include a citation describing its source (publication information, author, web link, date). Be prepared to share and discuss your thoughts with the class. Occurs in weeks one, two & four; in week three, students critique their own work from practice exercises to date.

Proof of Concept: With the assistance of the course instructor, identify and acquire a dataset comparable to that which you intend to collect/compile for your independent culminating project in marine policy, social science or oceanography. Based on your research objectives and planned approaches, create a suite (3-‐5) of graphics utilizing the example dataset that demonstrate your ability to carry out the intended project analyses. For each graphic, prepare appropriate accompanying text. Additionally, write a summary statement that justifies your data visualization method and display choices, and describes how each graphic serves your larger research objectives. Finally, outline your complete analytical plan for the subsequent portfolio work, including all proposed graphics – this will provide you and the course instructor a shared baseline for the work you will submit for review during the second half of the course.

Symposium: All students will share their Proof of Concept graphics suite for review by peers & faculty. Each will discuss their project focus and objectives as well as receive suggestions for alternative data visualization approaches in both written and verbal formats.

Project Drafts and Portfolio: During the second half of the course, students will create and iteratively revise a series of data visualizations specific to their marine policy, social science or oceanography research project. The focus remains on development of graphics that highlight major project findings and complement written products, both for web publication. Students will share three rounds of drafts with the course instructor for evaluation and feedback (weeks eight, ten & eleven). A portfolio of revisions will be maintained for growth assessment and serve as the final assignment for this course (due week twelve). Expectations and Requirements:

• Punctual attendance is required at every class meeting. • Active participation in class discussion is expected. • Late assignment submissions are not accepted.



• The policy on academic accuracy, quoted below, will be strictly followed in this class. The papers that you submit in this course are expected to be your original work. You must take care to distinguish your own ideas & knowledge from wording or substantive information that you derive from one of your sources. The term “sources” includes not only published primary & secondary material, but also information & opinions gained directly from other people & text that you cut & paste from any site on the Internet. The responsibility for learning the proper forms of citation lies with you. Quotations must be placed properly within quotation marks & must be cited fully. In addition, all paraphrased material must be acknowledged completely. Whenever ideas or facts are derived from your reading & research, the sources must be indicated. (Harvard Handbook for Students, 305)

• Considerations for use of internet sources: As you browse websites, assess their usefulness very critically. Who posted the information & why? Can you trust them to be correct? Authoritative? Unbiased? (It’s okay to use a biased source as long as you incorporate it knowingly & transparently into your own work.) Keep track of good sources that might be useful for subsequent assignments, & annotate in your bibliography any sites you cite. Your annotation should include the name of the author or organization originating any material that you reference. If you can’t identify the source, don’t use it!

Readings & Resources:

Texts Brewer, C. 2005. Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users. ESRI: Redlands, CA. 220p. Few, S. 2012. Show Me The Numbers: Designing Tables & Graphs to Enlighten. Analytics Press:

Burlingame, CA. 351p. Krygier, J. and D. Wood. 2011. Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for Geographic

Information Systems. Guilford: New York, NY. 256p. MacEachren, A.M. 2004. How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization & Design. Guilford:

New York, NY. 513p. Tufte, E.R. 2001. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. Graphics Press:

Cheshire, CT. 197p. Yau, N. 2013. Data Points: Visualization That Means Something. John Wiley & Sons, Inc:

Indianapolis, IN. 300p. Articles & Talks Koblin, A. 2011. Visualizing Ourselves….With Crowd-‐sourced Data. TEDTalk. (Video at

www.ted.com/talks) McCandless, D. 2010. The Beauty of Data Visualization. TEDTalk. (Video at www.ted.com/talks) Rosling, H. 2006. The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen. TEDTalk. (Video at www.ted.com/talks) Tufte, E. 2006. Offering “Beautiful Evidence.” NPR Weekend Edition Sunday Interview. (Audio

story at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5673332) Few, S. Series of articles at www.perceptualedge.com/library.php



Data Sources World Health Organization http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main Food & Agriculture Organization http://www.fao.org/statistics/databases/en/ The World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/ United Nations Environment Programme http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/ NOAA National Climatic Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ US Geological Survey EROS Center http://eros.usgs.gov/find-‐data US Census Data & Regional/Local Community Atlases

http://www.census.gov/main/www/access.html World Ocean Circulation Experiment http://www.ewoce.org/ Ocean Health Index (Raw Data) ftp://ohi.nceas.ucsb.edu/pub/data/2012/index.html Governments & organizations of countries to be visited on cruise Past SEA programs (scientific & port stop-‐derived datasets)



Course Calendar: All students will engage in Weeks 1-‐3 together. At the end of Week 3, each student will select either a Geospatial or Qualitative Data Track for the remaining weeks.

Topic Readings/Assignments Due

Week 1 (5 hours) – Patterns Over Time Datasets: El Nino Index, meteorological conditions, historic fisheries catches, US Census data Concepts: • Why use data to tell a story? • Identifying your objective(s) & audience • Critically evaluating data visualizations • Common data types (discrete v. continuous, numeric v. categorical, spatial v. non-‐spatial)

Skills: • Excel: bar charts, line graphs, highlighting time intervals or events, use of grids, smoothed/fitted lines

Tufte, Chpt. 1 Yau, Chpts. 1 & 3 Few, Chpt. 3 http://www.visual-‐literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html Two Practice Exercises Temporal Figure Critique Due

Week 2 (5 hours) – Proportions & Distributions Datasets: plankton community assemblages, island demographics Concepts: • Perception, visualization & interpretation of shapes, angles & lines

• The many meanings of color • Strategies for effective & appropriate use of color & space

• Selecting between approaches for a single dataset Skills: • Excel: pie charts, donut charts, stacked bar & area charts, histograms

Few, Chpts. 5 & 6 www.vischeck.com www.colorbrewer2.org www.alwayswithhonor.com/colours-‐culture www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/Schemes Yau, Chpts. 4 & 5 Two Practice Exercises Proportion Figure Critique Due

Week 3 (5 hours) – Relationships & Correlations Datasets: chemical conditions through the water column, potential factors influencing zooplankton abundance, Ocean Health Index Concepts: • Visual communication strategies & their selection for a given objective, audience & medium

• Effective use of titles, lead-‐in questions, captions & annotations

• Ideal balance of text/graphic/space Skills: • Excel: scatter plots, bubble plots, plot matrices, basic line fitting & statistics for correlations

Few, Chpts. 7, 9 & 10 & Appendix A Selected TEDtalks Two Practice Exercises Exercises Critique Due



Topic Readings/Assignments Due Week 4 (5 hours) Geospatial Data Track – Spatial Relationships Datasets: surface ocean biological & chemical data, island community locations & sites Concepts: • Reasons and strategies for map making, historical & modern

• Coordinate systems • Data types (vector v. raster) & map formats -‐ relative advantages & disadvantages of each

Skills: • QGIS: point vector mapping, classified & graduated color schemes, scaled points

• ODV: multidimensional cross-‐sections for oceanographic data

Krygier & Wood, Chpts. 1-‐3, 9 & 11 Brewer, Chpts. 1 and 6 Selections from ESRI’s ArcUser journal http://internal.gsd.harvard.edu/gis/manual/style Two Practice Exercises Vector Map Critique

Qualitative Data Track – The Value of Matrices Datasets: US/international resource management policies Concepts: • Choosing tables v. graphs • Organization & formatting of information • Effective use of font, color, line & space • Communicating multi-‐faceted data in a single table

Skills: • Excel & Word: matrices & tables

Few, Chpts. 4 & 8 Two Practice Exercises Matrix Critique Due

Week 5 (5 hours) Geospatial Data Track – Spotting Differences Datasets: US/international census data, Ocean Health Index data by EEZ, student-‐collected GPS data Concepts: • Key map projections – relative advantages & disadvantages

• Where to find publically-‐available geospatial data • Creating new geospatial datasets through collection of GPS/field data or digitization from existing resources

• Color choices in mapping Skills: • QGIS: generating & editing vector data files, projection conversions, line & polygon vector mapping (chlorpleth maps, heat maps)

Krygier & Wood, Chpts. 5-‐7 Brewer, Chpts. 4-‐5 QGIS dataset creation & editing tutorials Two Practice Exercises Begin Proof of Concept



Topic Readings/Assignments Due Week 5 (5 hours) Qualitative Data Track – Many Words into Few Datasets: interviews, questionnaires, narrative log or journal entries, historic documents Concepts: • Organization & coding of qualitative data • Strategies for exploring, identifying & illustrating connections between topics/processes

Skills: • ManyEyes/Wordle/Tagxedo: concept/mind-‐mapping, model diagrams, word clouds & word trees

TBD Two Practice Exercises Begin Proof of Concept

Week 6 (5 hours) Geospatial Data Track – Geospatial Analysis Datasets: coastal zone management, offshore wind siting requirements Concepts: • Relative benefits of displaying raw v. analyzed data • Strategies for conducting & communicating spatial analyses

• Value & application of raster data • Text & maps working together

Skills: • QGIS: vector analytical tools, networks, using multiple maps together, animations, raster data

Symposium (Proof of Concept Presentation)

Krygier and Wood, Chpt. 10 Brewer, Chpts. 3 and 7 QGIS tutorials for analytical techniques One Practice Exercise Proof of Concept Due at Project Symposium

Qualitative Data Track – Mixed Media Datasets: photo histories, short video documentaries Concepts: • Selecting photo/video subjects & resources • Linking a series of images to tell a story • Effective use of captions, superimposed annotations & descriptive text to support multimedia elements

Skills: • Basic photo/video editing software: storyboards & organization strategies, image cropping & simple editing, mixed media fundamentals

Symposium (Proof of Concept Presentation)

Browse & watch pieces from: www.bdsjs.com/facing-‐climate-‐change www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org & selected other sources One Practice Exercise Proof of Concept Due at Project Symposium



Topic Readings/Assignments Due Weeks 7 and 8 (8 hrs) Initial graphics. Portfolio Progress Review Meetings

First Drafts Due

Weeks 9 and 10 (8 hrs) Revise graphics and associated text. Portfolio Progress Review Meetings

Second Drafts (along with justification of changes/updates) Due

Week 11 (5 hr) Revise graphics & associated text. Portfolio Progress Review Meeting

Third Drafts (along with justification of changes/updates) Due

Week 12 (5 hrs) Create final project written & visual elements.

Final Digital Portfolio Due

Documents

Syllabus Data Communication and Visualization GO · 2014-04-22 · SEA$Semester®:TheGlobalOcean$ $ $$ $ Data$Communication$&$Visualization$@$4$ DataSources$ World$Health$Organization$