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Join our DataViz Community Partnerships for Spring 2016
Our weekly seminar will meet on Fridays from 12-1pm (light lunch provided) from January 29th to April 29th, 2016.
• Community partner sign-up: Describe your data visualization needs and request to be matched with a Trinity student intern, who you will supervise to work on your project for eight hours/week in Feb-March-April. Partners are welcome to all seminars, but must attend the Jan 29th lunchtime session and co-present the final products with the student at a late April event (choose among dates TBA).
• Trinity student sign-up: Describe your interests and request to be matched with a community partner for an eight hour/week internship. If approved, students must complete the internship application form and enroll in the weekly seminar (Formal Organizations 210, section 04), to earn 1.0 total credits. At least 5 students must enroll for this seminar to be offered. For questions, email jack.dougherty@trincoll.edu or book an appointment.
• Matchmaking between Trinity Students and Community Partners
Student Engagement with Open Data, Ferguson Library Public Forum, Stamford, Connecticut, July 8, 2015
My presentation will illustrate what students, faculty, and community partners can do with open data. Of course, open data is not a brand-new concept. For years, we have used federal census, state agency, and local government records to answer research questions. But open data makes our work easier and more accessible, for several reasons:
1) Open data is findable and exportable in many formats, such as the CT Education Directory, which enabled my students to create this basic school map, and to overlay school and town-level map data with a non-profit organization.
2) Open data providers can aggregate (or group) records in multiple ways, while protecting individual confidentiality, such as this data request, which led to our map of Hartford students by neighborhood residence.
3) Open data allows us to more easily build useful tools for the public, such as the Mobility App created by students with the Open Communities Alliance.
4) With open data, we also can build tools from live data feeds, such as this CTfastrak bus location site (beta version; learn how it works).
Remember: Technology is the easy part of open data. Rethinking our organizational roles and responsibilities requires hard work.
Data Viz Redesign
Personally, I have found this class to be very helpful in furthering my understanding of data and visualizing data. Before this class, I had the notion that data was just numbers that was used to show certain statistics, but I never thought about using data as a way of telling a story, or at least how to effectively tell a story with data.
Our class structure, the 0.5 credit seminar had its pros and cons. One of the things I liked about this structure was the time. The class itself wasn’t a huge time commitment, but at the same time, I was able to learn and get feedback from my own work and other student’s works. This was very helpful in terms of allowing me to think about my visualization and how I could make them better. Also, because it was only one hour a week, I was able to put more of my time into my internship which also allowed me to learn the insides and outs about research. On Wednesdays I would give an update on my work at research meetings at the Injury Prevention Center, which allowed me to further explain my project. However, because we didn’t have as much classroom time, I felt like we didn’t have enough time actually learning how to make visualizations. Although we used Google Charts and Google Fusion, I was expecting a variety of different programs or applications to make visualization, but it difficult in an hour long class.
The 3 week course, I feel like would be a little too hectic especially when paired with a community organization or internship. During the middle of the semester when the 3 week course would usually happen, I feel like a lot of students would be turned off by it since the middle of the semester is usually a busy time of the year.
I liked the third option the best since it allows for more variety of different ways to visualize data, but also allows for students to implement their learned skills with community organizations, although they won’t be spending as much time with them like an internship.
One suggestion that I think may work is having a semester long class that is partnered with one organization and using data from that organization for visualizations. During this class, coding and other methods of visualizations can be taught. Then during the next semester, students could take a follow-up class much like the one structure now and be paired with an organization for an internship. This way, students will already have experience with coding, but also have the opportunity to have an internship. Although this requires a lot of time, I feel like this would be a great way for students to obtain a skill and use that skill in the real world.
Redesigning the Seminar
First off, I think that a data visualization seminar is an incredibly important and relevant course, and it is worth continuing, especially when considering the shift of print journalism to online media. Since there is so much value in data visualization, I think it would be more effective to expand the seminar rather than shrink it into a 3-week module in an existing course. As a fan of the visualizations produced by The Economist and the New York Times, I began the seminar too ambitiously, and thought I would be able to produce similar visualizations. My lack of coding knowledge was definitely a source of frustration. Thus, from my personal experience, I think that option 3, expanding the course with more content and coding, is the best method of redesigning the seminar. This would enable the students to already have a set of tools to create visualizations before working with a community partner. I felt in the first few weeks of the seminar that I couldn’t really begin a fruitful relationship with my community partner because I had very limited data viz skills at the time.
Though, community partners should definitely remain a component of the course, because it offers a real world opportunity to put the skills you have learned to work. At the same time, more emphasis on coding might seem daunting to non-techie people. However, it is probably better to struggle through class with others than struggle alone. Therefore, it might also be beneficial to pair up students and have them work together with a community partner. Finally, I think that the talk from Alvin Chang was helpful in that it enabled me to take a step back from the more technical aspects of data viz, and remember what is the objective or the issue is that I am trying to address through my visualization, and how can I tell an effective story with it.