Components: Data, Visualization, 800-1000 word reflection
Worth: 20% of your Final Grade
Final drafts due (by email):

  • Data: 8/15, midnight (please have messier material in class on 8/15)
  • Visualization & accompanying Reflection: 8/19, noon

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. The rhetorical decisions we make when writing data, however, often consist of more than how we choose to reference data in written prose: these choices manifest, as well, in how our data is structured and how its represented by means other than text.

For your final assignment, I’d like you to quantify some aspect of your writing process and make a visualization of it. A reminder that 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. Just as we read to interact with and accumulate information about our everyday world — from restaurant menus to signs to — 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. Where do you encode information, and how?

The aspect of your writing process that you choose should be something that is recurring enough for you to consistently record data that describe it. It should also be data that you suspect collecting might help you to increase your self-knowledge. It may be that it doesn’t, and that’s 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?)

You will have to make a number of decisions when it comes to what data you will collect about this aspect. What data might it be revealing to collect and aggregate? For example, you might count:

  • how many words you read or write over time
  • wow many times you get “distracted” while reading or writing, when, and by what
  • where do you tend to read or write, and for how long
  • what topics you read about or from what kinds of sources
  • what tools or devices you use

Before taking data, you will also have to decide:

  • how to record your data, and with what tool(s)
  • what form your data will take
    • Will you require a binary representation (a yes/no or on/off)? Some sort of text? A numerical quantity?

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. These could be analog visualizations, à la Lupi and Posavec’s “Dear Data” project, or ones produced using computer software. 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. We will have a lab day where we talk about possibilities for what tools might be useful for you to use, given your existing computational literacies. Feel free to experiment with tactile elements as well, especially if you are going analog. (Please keep in mind that in this case I will need you to submit scans or photos of any analog visualizations, so I will not get to interact with the actual object.)

In 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?
  • 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.