Tag Archives: data visualization

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I hope you had the time of your life….a reflection on SIF

  April 20, 2015 , , , ,

As finals week quickly approaches, we are working at full capacity to bring projects to a space of completion.  And while the thought of the end of the semester brings along with the quintessential dialogue of, “…gosh…where did the time go?” Indeed, where did it go? It went into projects, big and small, that have brought new resources and information to the Georgia State community. Each click of the mouse bringing us closer and closer to the creation of a tool or resource which did not previously exist.  Through this post, I’d like to take a moment to look back and summarize the SIF experience. What you all have hopefully learned from me:  1) Maps have power  Maps, even within the current communication age which we are living in, still remain undervalued and misunderstood.  Maps gain our trust just by the mere act of being maps. They have the power to explain the world in ways that words do not. As I was told during a recent interview for my own thesis project, ” If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a million.” The ways we are making maps in changing. We should be critical of maps and understand the different viewpoints from which they are created 2) How to make your own maps  Throughout the blog post I have been able to offer a number of step by step guides to supply readers with some starting points to Google Earth  work and tools like Batch Geo. Additionally, over the year … Continue reading

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Playing around with data visualization and early modern texts

  January 26, 2015 , ,

As the Hoccleve project nears our first major milestone, the digital publication of an edition of Hoccleve’s holograph poems, we are beginning to ask questions about how to transform our XML into an HTML display. Thus, we are embarking on a graph design/display phase of our work. One of the things we have been discussing is creating data visualizations of the poems as an ornament to the edition. Most likely, these will be simple. Word clouds for instance. I have been asked to explore some options for this. This is not something that I have done before, but it is something that I have been curious about as a tool for my own work. Because the plain text versions of the poems weren’t quite ready, I decided to take a little time to begin explore what might be possible, from a historical perspective, with data visualization tools. I also figured it would make an interesting first blog post of the semester, even if at this point my foray into data visualization and data mining is completely amateurish. Even so, I am reporting on some early experiments using Voyant, a free web-based tool for textual analysis. I want to to see how it worked with early modern texts and with some of the documents I am using for my dissertation. This post is also offered in the spirit of a simple review of the software. My dissertation is a study of relations of power between the English and Native Americans in colonial … Continue reading

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More about Timelines and their Uses

  October 23, 2014 , ,

Timelines can be useful in teaching in a variety of ways. The most obvious is having students create a timeline on a particular topic that can be represented chronologically or progressively.  The choices the student makes of what to include on the timeline and what to say about the events not only help the student learn the material, but also to analyze the available information for what is most salient about the topic. The teacher can also use timelines to present material to students in a way to better illustrate the kind of connections events have within a span of time.  A timeline might open class discussions about how and in what ways an event affected other events that followed; or visualizing events on a timeline could reveal that previous assumptions of associations weren’t really so. Further, a class can contribute to a timeline tied to a teacher’s web site (or D2L), and multiple classes can contribute entries from semester to semester, creating an on-going wiki of sorts.  In this way, the entries by previous students serve to teach subsequent students and provide models of a successful entry.  (Eventually, depending on the topic, the wiki timeline would need to be taken down and started blank again for a new round of classes.)  George Pullman in the English department (and the co-director of CII) uses this approach in his Greek Rhetoric class—his timeline is meant to gather a “chronology of events thought to be significant to the development of Rhetoric,” and … Continue reading

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Where is the big picture?

  October 23, 2014 ,

I have been working as a SIF for about 2 months, I am excited about the projects that I am working on. Here is a status update regards what is happening to our main project and how things are shaping up. Project 1 Online Deliberation Mapping Tool Development This is our primary project. We had a design sprint meeting for the project, the participants were Heidi, Will, Justin, Nathan and the usual suspects Ram, Siva, Rushitha and Sruthi. The design sprint involves the following stages : – Understanding the problem Creating user stories Diverging of ideas Understanding the problem involves mapping the problem and the issues thereof. Here we discussed asynchronous spaces wherein there is lack of feel of shared experience, flow of conversations, development of ideas and their inter-dependencies. Most often in online spaces, the big picture is difficult to find and making the user not see the wood for the trees. This understanding of the problem at hand helped us define our goals for a space for asynchronous generative conversations. Participation is motivated by shared purpose, so the tool has to support formation and deliberation for a shared goal or purpose like solving or defining a problem, making a decision and to develop shared understanding. All these goals were defined from a pedagogical perspective. Possible solutions regarding the tool were discussed. User stories from the perspectives of instructor, early contributors, mediators and late contributors were discussed. With these broad use case scenarios, we proceeded to the next step. Diverging … Continue reading