Lab Exercise 3: Data Display Problem

 

This will count as a lab exercise even though software does not play a major role presenting a solution to this design problem.

 

In-Class Working Days:  Monday, October 13 and Wednesday October 15.

Due date:  Wednesday October 15 at the end of the class period.

Media for Turn-in:  Visuals and Verbal Rationales, as usual.  For the visual part, create sketches on plain, clean paper with pen, pencil, chalk, ink, crayon, marker.  Sketches (visuals) must be presented as professionally as possible, that is, neat lines, careful labeling. See your “position and immediate audience” instructions below. Verbal explanations for design decisions must be word processed, spell checked, formulated in some logical manner. 

 

Objective:  This exercise emphasizes the collective reasoning and sound planning that underpins a concise, yet data-rich, visual display appropriate to the rhetorical situation.  It ignores proficiency with any type of visual presentation software.  It calls on you to visualize the  relationships between different kinds of data.

 

Your position and your immediate audience for this exercise: Think of yourselves as editors, not producers of the final design.  Collectively, you will imagine how the relationships among these pieces of data should be displayed. You will then design a sketch and rationale that tells your co-worker, the graphics artist on staff, how you want this display to look.  Consider me (Romano) your supervisor, a higher up in the National Consortium of Local School Districts, who will review your instructions to your fellow employee. You want to convey your message to your co-worker and show me that your decisions are sound. Note well: This modifies a bit the assignment as presented in K & R.

 

Procedure:

 

  1. Before class, read through design problem # 3 on pp. 309-12 of Kostelnick and Roberts.  Note carefully the rhetorical situation (who will to do what with this information) and the “cultural values” assigned to each of the four types of information presented in the table (a through c on pp. 310 and 312). Note well: I’m altering the K&R problem as follows:  You are not actually making a recommendation. You are presenting data that will enable committee members to discuss intelligently and come to consensus.
  2. Do some seat-of-the-pants reasoning about how you would approach the problem of ranking these schools, if you were the sole decision maker.  If you want to use software such as Excel as a thinking tool to help you with this decision, you can do so.
  3. Think about what Tufte would say about presenting data to decision makers.  Again, your audience wants to gain the authority to make a good decision based on your display of information. 
  4. Now read Chapter 7 on Data Displays. Use this chapter as a resource. That is, practice “mining” this information source for ideas about how to best present the data to the stated audience.  “Try on” the data when you come to types of displays that seem promising.

 

Suggested Approaches:

 

  1. Rather than crunch all the numbers, create ranges or blocks to work with.  For example, you might use a color or line or bar or area to represent all school districts whose average teacher salaries are above 32,000 or below, whose ITBS scores are above 90, between 80 and 90, and so forth.
  2. Remember Tufte’s admonition that such displays must not eliminate data that seems out of the range because this “outside” data is crucial for comparison.  The five superintendents of schools on the decision committee will not want their districts “off the chart.”
  3. Consider different kinds of displays: line graphs, bar charts, scatter plots. Try on the data and gage the fit.

 

Final Words:

 

This is a hard problem with several possible solutions. When we finish, we’ll compare solutions in terms of their strengths and limitations. But this is not a contest, and often we learn a lot by trial and error, by attempting and revising those attempts, by working together and comparing solutions.  I will give your group a collective grade. Then you may take this work and revise it individually for your portfolios if you wish.

 

You have two full class periods to work on this problem collectively, but you have lots of time to think about it individually before putting heads together. Take advantage of this time and come to the table with at least two good ideas.

 

The lab is open on Wednesdays from 12 to 1, so groups can use this extra hour to work together if you are able.