Components: Data, Visualization, 800-1000 word reflection
Worth: 25% of your Final Grade
Final drafts due (by email):

  • Data: 12/4 before class
  • Visualization & accompanying Reflection: 12/11

In the past few classes, we’ve talked about the role algorithms have as nonhuman “actants” in constraining how we write and gatekeeping the circulation of what we have written. We have come to focus on our subjective role in writing for the technical professions, collecting and presenting data with a mix of human and non-human audiences in mind. We will continue to explore in the coming weeks how we can most effectively use data in that representation and storytelling.

You’ve already had practice making rhetorical decisions to represent, contextualize, and analyze data in textual genres. Writing with and about data, however, often involves incorporating visuals that communicate with means other than text. Sometimes, in fact, visuals stand on their own and take on the full weight of communicating data-driven research. Like with text, it’s your job as a writer to make decisions about structure, scope, and representation — all of which depend on your purpose and audiences.

For your final assignment, I’d like you to quantify some aspect of your writing process and make a visualization of it. Since this is a reflective assignment, this aspect should be something that you suspect collecting might help you to increase your self-knowledge. What major question might you have about yourself as a writer that might lend itself well to aggregating some data? Do you want to know where or when you tend to write? How “focused” you are when you do it? What kinds of writing you most often produce, or engage with as an active reader? What tools or platforms do you use?

(A reminder: our understanding of writing, here, is broadly-conceived. So, please try not to be concerned if you aren’t engaging with or producing academic writing at the moment in other contexts than this course. Just as we read to interact with and accumulate information about our everyday world — from restaurant menus to road signs to tax form instructions — we write in a variety of contexts. The writing you choose to look at could be, for example, your text messages, emails, social media posts, or notes.)

So, how will you get this data? You have two major options here:

  • collect the data yourself over a certain period
  • use some existing data collected about you and your habits to which you have access (for example, from Google docs, an app etc.)

In either case, you will also have to decide:

  • how to record or get your data, and with what tool(s)
  • how many and what kinds of variables will you need
    • A binary representation (a yes/no or on/off)? Some sort of descriptive text or categorical variable? A numerical quantity?
  • where your data will live, and what structure it will take

Assignment Requirements

Data

Before the final project is due, you will submit to me a textual encoding of the data you’ve taken. For most projects, this will probably be tabular data. The format does not matter to me, and will entirely depend on the environments in which you are used to working: a .csv or .xlsx spreadsheet is fine; so is a JSON file. Please approach me if you need help thinking about how you might organize your data.

Visualization(s)

For the final, you will submit a visualization or small set of visualizations of your data. Because I would like you to experiment as much as possible with your visuals, I am requiring these to be analog visualizations, à la Lupi and Posavec’s “Dear Data” project. We will be looking at this project in detail in class. Feel free to experiment with tactile elements as well.

Why analog? Teaching digital tools for visualization is beyond the scope of this course; however, if you have such a proficiency and would like to produce your visualizations with computer software (e.g. Tableau, a visualization package in a higher-level programming language, etc.), please see me for approval. If you do go this route, I encourage you to avoid using out-of-the-box visualization solutions, such as the graphs in Microsoft Excel, since they will prove to be overly constraining if your data is appropriately individualized and nuanced.

In both of these components, I will be looking for:

  • your data and visualizations to be appropriately labeled with variables and units. Otherwise, your reader may not know what they’re looking at. (Or, maybe, you intend to initially confound your viewer. If so, make sure they’re specified someplace in an accompanying doc.)
  • a balance of clarity and complexity in your visual design. These aesthetic choices will help you to achieve your purpose. How can you make your data legible to your audience? We will go over, and interrogate, some best practices for visualization in class.
  • your visualization to interpret as well as to describe. A simple bar chart, for example, of the data you collected in the variables you chose, will probably not suffice to answer the questions you posed for yourself. So, try to avoid the temptation to highlight your data table, hit the plot button, make it pretty, and move on. What can you calculate from what you’ve already collected to answer your questions about your writing process?

Reflection (850-1000 words)

Along with your visualization(s), you will submit an essay that refers to them, focusing on what you learned about yourself and your data. Further, are there any aspects of your data you see that make you think of, or think differently of, what we’ve covered in class: readings, theories, tasks? This reflection could be a typical paper with me and your classmates as your primary audience, or something you might consider as a blog post for a more public audience; in either case, the prose can be relatively informal to the extent that it is still precise, analytical, and persuasive. Please feel free to include descriptions of your process in narrative form, but remember that these descriptions should be relevant to the purpose of sharing some insight with your reader about either your processes for writing and data analysis and visualization.

Some guiding questions for your reflection:

  • What choices did you make when collecting data? What did you choose to record or not? How did you record it — for example, in what structure and over what interval? What tools did you use to do so?
  • What choices did you make in representing that data visually? Describe your aesthetic choices and the rationale behind them.
  • How did your data illuminate or not illuminate the aspect of your writing process that you sought to better understand? It may be that they don’t, and that’s totally fine, but be prepared to explain why the absence of answers for your questions might be telling in itself. (If it doesn’t answer the questions you had in mind, what might it suggest instead?)
  • How might you rethink your choices if you did this sort of project again?

Acknowledgements

This assignment was heavily adapted from Ryan Cordell’s “Dear (My) Data” assignment for his course on “Reading and Writing in the Digital Age” at Northeastern University.