Category Archives: etexts

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Information to Graphics: Still an Arduous Task

  February 16, 2015

There remains a missing link between linking data to publish-ready graphics. Because many data visualization programs are designed for business use, they do not have the best customization and design options. A few updates could really boost productivity for us designers. Working on the Tobacco e-Book Projects we chose Tableau as our data visualization software. Tableau became most appropriate predominately for its ease of use and modern graphic style. Excel charts, even with customization, are easy to spot as Excel generated. Since we are anticipating this e-book to be published, we required a more custom format. Although Tableau provided a great start for our charts and graphs, we ran into several limitations regarding design. One such limitation was the lack of an ability to create templates. For this project, being an e-book, several graphs were needed, and a consistent style was needed. Unfortunately, each graph had to be manually adjusted. The font, font size, line spacing and a bunch of other variables were hand selected for each graph…very time consuming. To make matters worse, editing the spacing was never a precise move. I ended up placing a the previous graph onto whichever one I was editing and would “line up” the sides, and bottom of the graph. This was to have some approximation of consistency in line spacing throughout the e-book. It would have been a huge help to have been able to create a templates so that every font, every spacing attribute, color scheme and so-on, were already set.    The following parameters would need to be set … Continue reading

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The Tableau Experience

  November 20, 2014 , , ,

Today I attended “The Tableau Experience.” I’ve been struggling with what to call it: a conference, a convention… It had only one speaker, and a Q&A – and a wet-bar.  So… I’m settling with ‘experience’ as they do. What it really was though, was an advertisement. Don’t get me wrong – I like using Tableau to recreate charts for the Tobacco Ebook I’m working on, and this ‘experience’ was worth it for several reasons: 1. The speaker demoed several ways to share data that I haven’t seen in action since I’ve only been using it to create charts for data sets that are already created for me.   2. There were a lot of people there from many different kinds of institutions.  I met others from universities like me – Georgia Tech, Gwinnett College, and so on. But I spent most of the time schmoozing with a lady from Home Depot, and then talked briefly to a man from a company called Norfolk. Everyone was using Tableau for something different – I’m pretty sure I was the only one making an Ebook. 3. I was able to ask about that pesky issue Ryan Cagle and I have been having in trying to get the distance between pane tick marks and labels to be exactly the same in all our charts so they’re uniform within the Ebook. Sorry, Ryan – there is no way to do this. The guy I asked said your idea was the smartest. Overall, I’m glad I went to … Continue reading

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eBooks in Higher Education, especially in Libraries

  November 12, 2014 ,

The history of the codex includes myriad and often convoluted ways of producing and distributing the book to readers.  Current day production and distribution of eBooks is no different in its dizzying variety.  To narrow things down, here I will present a snippet of the information available on how eBooks get to readers within the higher education system.  In particular, I want to mention some ways in which university libraries acquire and distribute eBooks. First of all, universities and colleges are increasing acquiring more eBooks than print books; among all U.S. academic libraries, as of 2012, more than half of their added materials were eBooks.  This is especially true for community colleges, which makes sense given it would be more convenient for their commuter student population to access materials remotely.  But, for all libraries, eBooks make sense; physical books take up a lot of space, which translates into the need for more real estate.  A perpetual problem for libraries continues to be the need for space for their collections. See the table below from the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Almanac of Higher Education, 2014,” extracted from U.S. Department of Education figures, FY 2012 (http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/article/Percentage-of-E-Books-at/147835/). Table of Percentage of E-Books at Academic Libraries, by Institution Type, FY 2012 click chart to enlarge University or college libraries depend on a variety of means to provide eBooks to users and there are several different kinds of middle-people distributors who provide content to be consumed by readers via different methods.  First, and perhaps most … Continue reading

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eTextbooks

  November 5, 2014 ,

I recently read a 2014 article about eTextbooks; the focus of the narrative study, published in College Teaching and written by Jenny Bossaller and Jenna Kammer, both at the University of Missouri, centered on faculty experience with eTextbooks, particularly those developed by college textbook publishers, and the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and arrangement. Bossaller and Kammer’s purpose in the article was “to inform instructors and administrators of the positive aspects (such as convenience, portability, and currency) and negative aspects (such as privacy, cost, and outsourcing) of teaching with etexts” (69).  Their methodology included a literature review about etext use in higher education and narrative interviews with eight faculty who had used etexts produced in conjunction with vendors (and in some cases, faculty who had also produced their own eTextbook). The authors list from another study (Cheverie, Peterson, and Cummings, 2012), “six major policy areas for etexts in higher education: affordability, broadband (network connectivity), information policy (encompassing access versus ownership, Digital Rights Management [DRM], and preservation), accessibility, privacy and security, and identity management (capable of single sign-on)”, but focus in their paper on affordability, privacy, and access, and add to this list outsourcing etext production, which they define as an important policy decision made by the faculty and university (69). The information in the study surprised me in several ways: 1.  I had not read much about nor thought much about the policy implications of the fact that college textbook companies have expanded their roles these days and are … Continue reading

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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