Seek and Find 1: Bring Me A Visualization!

by Mike Gleicher on December 27, 2016

Due: Friday, January 20th (see the class late policy). The assigment will close on Friday, January 27th. For this assignment, there may be some extra leniency to allow people to work out technical issues in handing in the assignment

Assessment: We will give you a score on the 70 point scale (see grading). A good assignment will include a valid picture and link, and a brief answer to the question. For this assignment, it’s hard to imagine how you can do something notable.

Turning it in: There will be a “discussion” on Canvas that you can post to. Make sure to include your picture and a link, and your answer to the question.

Learning Objectives (why are you doing this): We want you to be a little more aware of the visualizations that you encounter in your life. We also want to work out the mechanics of handing in assignments, specifically seek and finds.

What you need to do:

For this assignment you must bring us a …. (data) visualization!

(sorry, this is a reference to an old Monty Python movie – if you don’t know the reference, that line won’t be funny. Even if you do know the reference, it might not be funny).

The idea here is to see how common visualizations are in the world. My guess is you’ve seen a lot of them in the past week. Bring us one of them. It should be something you find interesting, and would have encountered in your life. You shouldn’t have to look hard to find one. But, you might want to look a little bit for an interesting one.

Each week, we will ask you to bring us a visualization (we will have these seek and find assignments every week). For this week, bring us any visualization. Subject to the Seek and Find ground rules:

  • It cannot be a visualization that you (or someone in class) made.
  • It must be publicly available.
  • You must be able to provide an image.
  • If it’s on a web page, you should copy a picture (either use a screen shot or copy the image). Please shrink the image to a reasonable size, if it’s too small for people to see the detail, they’ll be able to get it from the link you give.  Post your image on Canvas following these instructions.
  • Try to find something interesting (to you at least)
  • There may be other rules added

Create a posting and include a picture of the visualization. If you found the visualization on the web, provide a link to the page that it is on (if it’s hard to find on that page, give some clues like “on page 4 of https://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2015/AG15/Submission-FINAL-7-27-2015.pdf“). If you scanned it or photograph it, describe where you got it from (scanned from p7 of January 6th Capital Times).

Try to pick something that you don’t think anyone else will pick. Even though you can peek and see what others are posting, someone might post at the same time as you, so try to avoid redundancy although this isn’t a strict rule.

For week 1, you can pick any data visualization – but pick one that you encountered recently. Either something from your day to day life, your research, your hobbies, …

You are welcome to discuss other people’s submissions (you are allowed to comment on canvas). Discussion is not required for Seek and Find 1, but participating in optional discussions can contribute to your online participation grade.

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