Figuring out Charts (45 min)
Vocab: Charts = Graphs. Charts = Everything that isn’t a table or an image/photograph
Journal 6 responses
Rank the below in order of agreement to disagreement. Why’d you order it the way you did?
putting the images between paragraphs gives the reader a “brain break”
to notice trends in the data.This method is good for displaying values that stand out compared to the rest
Too much data?: This tends to draw the reader away, including too much data could lead to useless data being presented or the reader not being able to distinguish between options on the graph as well.
I think the chance of a chart being confusing and unfamiliar to a reader is lowest with the use of a bar chart. No matter the education level of the reader, I think bar charts are easy to navigate
Let’s look at some stuff
Since Journal 6 was about looking back at some stuff you did, I thought we would look at an example paper. On CourseWeb in Course Documents, download “Charts Example Paper.” Read it and consider the following questions:
- POSITIVITY. This isn’t a question, but this is from a classmate. Remember last class: If YOU were a poorly constructed table, would you want someone just laying on the blunt criticism over and over, right from the start? What is working here? What do you like?
- What trends/patterns/stories do these charts highlight?
- Do they stand on their own? How so?
- How does the text supplement the charts? How do they mirror the order of the story in the chart and the order in the text?
- Design or accessibility things?
- Compare to tables: what is the reading experience like? How do you read with a figure in the middle of things? What is that like compared to a table?
- What is gained or lost if you changed the chart to a different type?
Chart Scenarios
Think of as many USEFUL kinds of charts for the kind of data scenarios as you can possibly think of. Would recommend drawing them out a bit. The table on page 174-176 is really helpful on this in Miller.
You want to look at a distribution of one variable, what do you do for…
- Proportions of a budget for your job or for the government
- Distribution of SAT test scores
A relationship between variables
- null
- Rainy days per year, 2009-2018
- Rainy days per year for each season (winter, spring, summer, fall)
- Unemployment by month
- Association between income of parents and income of children
Let’s make a table and chart
-Earthquake data, make one table and one chart. Which variable? Why? What do you envision doing? Use JN1 or other JNs (JN1 has the most possibilities but pretty sure second one and some others also have most of those)
In-class time on projects (20-30 min)
-do a huddle with grant proposal people
–IMRaD stuff from last class under the last section of the lesson plan
Next Time
-Journal 7 is due
-Read Data Feminism chapter
-Work on project