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Tableau Training

  November 3, 2014 ,

Since the beginning of SIF, I’ve been on the Tobacco Ebook project. I have learned iBooks Author layout and design techniques, which has completely reoriented my thinking about how design works, and increased my attention to detail by… a lot. This week, I got moved from layout and table building within iBooks Author to recreating charts in a program called Tableau. Tableau can create really clean-looking, beautiful line graphs, bar graphs, and many other types of graphs and charts, like pie charts :). But it’s not easy. First, the data in the spreadsheets the book writers provided us with must be formatted in a way that Tableau ‘likes,’ which is a feat all on its own. If the data isn’t formatted properly, nothing works. Then, the chart has so many formatting options, its enough to make any beginner’s head spin. Here are two screen shots of graphs I’ve been working with that I can’t seem to get to combine – one line graph and one bar graph: The good news is that once I figure out how to make the graphs function the way I like, they are actually pretty easy to make and turn out well. Thankfully, Will knows how to do most of it and is helping me figure out the trickier aspects. Phew! Valerie

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Another Post on Gamification!

  November 3, 2014 , ,

Hey All! I’ve been working like crazy on comprehensive exams this week and thought I would share some of the latest dialogue on Gamification I’ve researched and written. I think it’s a highly relevant topic to a lot of contemporary research that has any public leaning–like our reconstruction of Decatur St project we’re still investigating and researching. Enjoy! How Gamification has Transformed Web-Based Interaction: Black Hat vs. White Hat The terms white hat and black hat originate from the hacker community. White hat hacking refers to those who break cyber security barriers for non-malicious reasons; testing internal security for vulnerabilities(Knight 2009)(Douglas 2010: 503), and sometimes extended into civil activism like leaking documents into the press. Black hat hacking refers to the violation of computer security systems for maliciousness or personal gain(Moore 2005: 258). The dichotomy is in the intention behind one’s action. The terms were applied by Yu-Kai Chou (2014) in his theories of gamification to mirror the intention behind its application. White hat elements of design promote engagement by letting the user express creativity, feel success through mastering the gamified application, and promote a higher sense of meaning—it fosters positive emotions. Black hat elements are those that demand user action from unpredictability of rules, fear of loss, or from the need for things given arbitrary value. The motivations to engage are still evident with black hat elements, but the end user experience elicits negative emotions. Although Chou draws this distinction of good and bad motivating game design elements—black hat … Continue reading

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Formatting Data for Tableau, data visualization software

  November 3, 2014

Tableau seems to be gaining traction as the go-to platform for data visualization. It’s common enough around CURVE and online to warrant learning or at least becoming familiar with. It’s an easy to use data visualization software with features far above the visualization tools Excel has to offer, and it’s free to students. Some of the more interesting aspects of Tableau are it’s geographic component, useful for mapping, and its ability to host online dashboards, effectively creating interactive data visualizations for your website or blog. In any case, at at some point your task will be taking existing data and formatting it into something pretty, or at least easy to understand. And if someone’s sending you data, it will most likely be from Excel; so it’s good to know how to Tableau reads Excel data. Believe me it’s not always cut and paste. Some general rules, to think about: Don’t summarize your data in Excel, e.g. grand totals, let Tableau do that. Take a redundant row-based approach to the data. Don’t let the whole picture be summarized across one row. Instead, use multiple rows each listing only one piece of data each (I’ll explain below) We were given a number of charts to recreate in Tableau and the essential problem was that the summarization needs to be left up to Tableau itself. Original Data Not Formatted for Tableau The problem with the above is Tableau does not understand it. Tableau doesn’t know 22 is linked to 12-17 years old, that … Continue reading

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Time For Some Updates

  November 3, 2014

I have been a member of the SIF family now for a little more than two months, so I guess it’s about time to go through all of my projects for this semester and give you updates on each. 1) Hybrid Pedagogy Promotional Videos This project has been a straightforward one from the beginning. The general idea is to record a series of interviews with faculty members who are experienced with a teaching that blends online and offline (i.e. in-class) activities–in other words, hybrid teaching. For this, we have come up with a set of focused interview questions, and over the course of the first 6 weeks we have conducted various interviews with faculty members. We have been able to compile a great amount of material to work with. We are currently in the post-production phase of this project, or should I say the first stage of this project since we believe that promoting hybrid teaching should also be considered from the students’ perspectives. To that end, we are planning to conduct more interviews with students in the course of the next semester in order to balance the information we have so far received from faculty. I am currently in the process of learning Adobe Premiere Pro so that I am also able to help out with the post-production process. 2) Outreach and Documenting Similar to the project above, this one is also clearly situated in the world of promotion. The basic premise of this project is to promote places … Continue reading

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Giving Artists New Tools Through Science And Technology

  October 30, 2014

Building connections between seemingly disparate areas is one of the joys of being an artist. It’s also one of the biggest challenges. Conceptually, artists are trained (or train themselves) to look at topics from multiple angles and to build relationships that express the nuances of the proverbial “human condition” (one of my least-favorite artspeak terms, though it seems appropriate in this context). We take input from the world around us, process it through the lense of our personal experiences and knowledge, then spit it out in some novel way as artwork. Art schools are generally pretty good at giving artists artistic tools, but the focus tends to be on traditional art-making practice and thinking. Even new-media programs seem to focus on accepted art and design technology, such as Adobe Photoshop and the like. But what happens when an artist wants to expand their research into scientific fields, or access big data? The tools are out there, but the learning curve is so steep as to be seen as insurmountable. I’ve heard from multiple artists that they’d love to access primary sources of information, but dont know how or where to look. Consequently they end up relying on possibly inaccurate second- or third-hand information, with the caveat that it’s okay because it’s art, not science. To a certain extent that’s true: (probably) no one’s going to die if an artist uses bad or incomplete data. However, art can expose and educate us to experience and information in ways that no spreadsheet … Continue reading