This document discusses visualization as a new media literacy. It defines visualization as the ability to interpret and create data representations to express ideas, find patterns, and persuade people to take action. Visualization allows large amounts of data to be understood through images and interactions. It has become more common in news media and opens data to public understanding. The document outlines how visualization has developed from scientific use to broader applications and discusses it in relation to other new media literacies. Challenges of visualization like determining meaningful data and transparent representations are also covered. The document suggests encouraging students to participate in visualization communities of practice to better understand changing data representations over time.
Presentation given during Panel 1 ("Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?") at "Research Conditions and Digital Humanities: What are the Prospects for the Next Generation? #dhiha5" (10–11 June 2013, Paris), an international colloquium organised by Mareike König (IHA), Georgios Chatzoudis (Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung), in cooperation with Pierre Mounier (Cleo).
What Data Can Do: A Typology of Mechanisms
Angèle Christin .
International Journal of Communication > Vol 14 (2020) , de Angèle Christin del Departamento de Comunicación de Stanford University, USA titulado "What Data Can Do: A Typology of Mechanisms". Entre otras cosas es autora del libro "Metrics at Work.
Presentation given during Panel 1 ("Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?") at "Research Conditions and Digital Humanities: What are the Prospects for the Next Generation? #dhiha5" (10–11 June 2013, Paris), an international colloquium organised by Mareike König (IHA), Georgios Chatzoudis (Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung), in cooperation with Pierre Mounier (Cleo).
What Data Can Do: A Typology of Mechanisms
Angèle Christin .
International Journal of Communication > Vol 14 (2020) , de Angèle Christin del Departamento de Comunicación de Stanford University, USA titulado "What Data Can Do: A Typology of Mechanisms". Entre otras cosas es autora del libro "Metrics at Work.
IN THIS SUMMARY
In The New Social Learning, the authors make the case that the deepest, most enduring impact of social media might be on workforce learning. They show how social media can improve the way companies recruit talent, engage employees, and build a workforce’s capabilities. While social learning is not a replacement for training and employee development, it can accomplish what traditional approaches often cannot. Networks of knowledgeable people can make informed decisions and solve complex problems in ways they could not have dreamed of years ago. Social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.
SUBSCRIBE TODAY
http://www.bizsum.com/summaries/new-social-learning
Slides from a series of talks for the IET's IoT India Congress and some associated events - SRM Chennai, PES Bengaluru, Srishti Bengaluru. I used different subsets of the slides in each talk - this is the whole deck.
This presentation related to the "Experimentation of Variables Related to Launch of Self-Published Book" was created as part of MCOM 6050 Master's Report at Texas Tech University. It supports the release and marketing effort of the book I Saved the World and I'm Only in 4th Grade by Hiroshi Sosa-Nakata.
Networks, swarms and policy: what collective intelligence means for policy ma...Alberto Cottica
Policy makers are taking up network thinking; citizens are self-organizing in smart swarms displaying collectivley intelligent behaviour. I address the implications of these phenomena for policy making, and look at some tools being built by a project called CATALYST that might help both citizens and policy makers.
School libraries are at the heart of a new digital learning nexus. Our world changed in April 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser was released to the general public. The challenges we face are equally creative as they are complex. What is your focus for tomorrow?
Diana C. Sisson and Tara M. Moretensen, Journal of Public Relations Education, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 78-95
Educating students for the social, digital and information world: Teaching public relations infographic design
Abstract
"This study employs an exploratory content analysis of current public relations information graphics to examine variables within two concepts pertaining to public relations: transparency and clarity. These two concepts were chosen because they apply to both traditional public relations practice and are also widely taught amongst contemporary infographics design experts. The subjects of the study are nonprofit organizations’ online informational graphics (N = 376) that have been released on Twitter. Findings suggest that nonprofit organizations are not applying traditional public relations principles to their design of online information graphics, demonstrating difficulty in translating these principles to visual design, a skill that is becoming more important. While the study is not intended to generalize, this snapshot of current practice is used to offer improvements in preparing public relations students for communication with information visualizations. This exploration illuminates the need for public relations education geared toward the social, visual, and data-driven environment. To this end, the study uses these findings to develop an initial set of practices for infographic design that can be implemented into current public relations education."
http://aejmc.us/jpre/2017/12/29/educating-studen…fographic-design/
Insight slides from working with the Open Environmental Data Project brain trust during October-December 2020. These insights were generated from conversations around this body of work: https://www.openenvironmentaldata.org/a-new-model-series
New Visual Social Media for the Higher Education ClassroomRochell McWhorter
Authors: Julie A. Delello and Rochell R McWhorter
This chapter examines how next-generation visual social platforms motivate students to capture authentic evidence of their learning and achievements, publish digital artifacts, and share content across visual social media. Educators are facing the immediate task of integrating social media into their current practice to meet the needs of the twenty-first century learner. Using a case study, this chapter highlights through empirical work how nascent visual social media platforms such as Pinterest are being utilized in the college classroom and concludes with projections on ways visual networking platforms will transform traditional models of education.
IN THIS SUMMARY
In The New Social Learning, the authors make the case that the deepest, most enduring impact of social media might be on workforce learning. They show how social media can improve the way companies recruit talent, engage employees, and build a workforce’s capabilities. While social learning is not a replacement for training and employee development, it can accomplish what traditional approaches often cannot. Networks of knowledgeable people can make informed decisions and solve complex problems in ways they could not have dreamed of years ago. Social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.
SUBSCRIBE TODAY
http://www.bizsum.com/summaries/new-social-learning
Slides from a series of talks for the IET's IoT India Congress and some associated events - SRM Chennai, PES Bengaluru, Srishti Bengaluru. I used different subsets of the slides in each talk - this is the whole deck.
This presentation related to the "Experimentation of Variables Related to Launch of Self-Published Book" was created as part of MCOM 6050 Master's Report at Texas Tech University. It supports the release and marketing effort of the book I Saved the World and I'm Only in 4th Grade by Hiroshi Sosa-Nakata.
Networks, swarms and policy: what collective intelligence means for policy ma...Alberto Cottica
Policy makers are taking up network thinking; citizens are self-organizing in smart swarms displaying collectivley intelligent behaviour. I address the implications of these phenomena for policy making, and look at some tools being built by a project called CATALYST that might help both citizens and policy makers.
School libraries are at the heart of a new digital learning nexus. Our world changed in April 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser was released to the general public. The challenges we face are equally creative as they are complex. What is your focus for tomorrow?
Diana C. Sisson and Tara M. Moretensen, Journal of Public Relations Education, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 78-95
Educating students for the social, digital and information world: Teaching public relations infographic design
Abstract
"This study employs an exploratory content analysis of current public relations information graphics to examine variables within two concepts pertaining to public relations: transparency and clarity. These two concepts were chosen because they apply to both traditional public relations practice and are also widely taught amongst contemporary infographics design experts. The subjects of the study are nonprofit organizations’ online informational graphics (N = 376) that have been released on Twitter. Findings suggest that nonprofit organizations are not applying traditional public relations principles to their design of online information graphics, demonstrating difficulty in translating these principles to visual design, a skill that is becoming more important. While the study is not intended to generalize, this snapshot of current practice is used to offer improvements in preparing public relations students for communication with information visualizations. This exploration illuminates the need for public relations education geared toward the social, visual, and data-driven environment. To this end, the study uses these findings to develop an initial set of practices for infographic design that can be implemented into current public relations education."
http://aejmc.us/jpre/2017/12/29/educating-studen…fographic-design/
Insight slides from working with the Open Environmental Data Project brain trust during October-December 2020. These insights were generated from conversations around this body of work: https://www.openenvironmentaldata.org/a-new-model-series
New Visual Social Media for the Higher Education ClassroomRochell McWhorter
Authors: Julie A. Delello and Rochell R McWhorter
This chapter examines how next-generation visual social platforms motivate students to capture authentic evidence of their learning and achievements, publish digital artifacts, and share content across visual social media. Educators are facing the immediate task of integrating social media into their current practice to meet the needs of the twenty-first century learner. Using a case study, this chapter highlights through empirical work how nascent visual social media platforms such as Pinterest are being utilized in the college classroom and concludes with projections on ways visual networking platforms will transform traditional models of education.
Lev Manovich.
How and why study big cultural data.
Presentation at Data Mining and Visualization for the Humanities symposium, NYU, March 19, 2012.
softwarestudies.com
Rethinking Learning in the Age of Digital FluencyJudy O'Connell
Digital connectivity is a transformative phenomenon of the 21st century. While many have debated its impact on society, educators have been quick to mandate technology in school development - often without analysing the digital fluency of those involved, and the actual impact on learning. Is being digitally tethered creating a new learning nexus for those involved?
Similar to Visualization as a New Media Literacy (20)
The Leveraging Engagement framework seeks to help reveal the nuances of fan involvement, specifically
identifying the various fan objects, activators and environments that inspire people to engage, as well as the
media properties and communities associated with them.
This study offers a sports fanship framework aimed at building a unique brand engagement positioning that
draws on a’ deep understanding of communities and shared passions. The framework can be used to
develop better marketing and communications tools.
Though children have a healthy appetite across “traditional screens” such as television and movies, computers, and video games, their usage of these screens is declining. Instead, there’s been an upswing in children’s consumption of and participation in media through a mobile device. And though a mobile device is what every child expects to have in their pocket, the next big thing coming in mobile is wearable devices combined with the Internet of Things (IoT) as we saw in the announcement of the Fall release of Disney’s Playmation. This shift places a clear demand on creators: Offer something different to today’s digital kids.
Applying participatory learning to STEM
E. Shaw, M. La, R. Phillips, and E. Reilly, “PLAY Minecraft! Assessing Secondary Engineering Education using Game Challenges within a Participatory Learning Environment,” in Proceedings of the 2014 ASEE Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IN, June 2014, Session W447.
Transmedia processes show us that there is more than one way to tell stories, more we can learn about the characters and their world, and that such insights encourage us to imagine aspects of these characters that have not yet made it to the screen. While some might look at it strictly for entertainment value, creating a new lens to look at story offers a different point of view.
One distinct logic we have explored at the Annenberg Innovation Lab is Transmedia Play. Human imagination feeds upon the culture around it and children show enormous capacity to re-imagine the stories that enter their lives.
These visuals were used to support / start the conversation with SOTA's high school students in Singapore. The focus was to look at various forms of art that encompassed the NML skills, collective intelligence, visualization and play.
Students lose track of time as they spend hours navigating the web for material to create their stories and feel a sense of belonging through encouragement by their peers to post their stories on Facebook, illustrate them on Flickr, and share them with friends and the public at large through the multiple resources available on the web. This participation in new media environments is a way to be creative and innovative, but it is also new opportunities for our students to acquire and synthesize information in a meaningful way. Students today often remix original texts based on their own interests in order to create a new work that encapsulates their ideas and concerns about the issues that matter most to them.
In 2008-2009, Project New Media Literacies tested the Media Makers Challenge Collection, a set of 30 challenges to explore and practice the new media literacies. This collection was established as a springboard for educators to adopt the new media literacies into their own situation. Media educators from Global Kids used the materials as inspiration to develop Media Masters, an after-school program at the High School for Global Citizenship to integrate the new media literacies into a social issues learning environment. Media Masters helped learners acquire and reflect upon digital media production and analytic skills through youth engagement in participatory media and Web 2.0 tools. This presentation will explore how theory and practice merged to create a conversation, rather than a top-down transfer of knowledge, between participating researchers, practitioners and students.
Erin Reilly, Research Director, shares with iCELTIC in June 2008, the current research happening at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Project New Media Literacies.
Journalism is in a paradigm shift. More than any generation to come before them, today’s young people are participating in the creation and sharing of culture with the immediacy and connectedness that a digitally networked world provides. In many cases, these young adults are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures; a participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to one of community involvement.
The Media Maker Collection is a set of challenges that explore the new media literacies within the context of media artists and production. Challenges are media-based lessons to provide instruction or share an idea or a story. This collection provides a template for contributions from members who want to use the Learning Library to develop their own challenges.
http://newmedialiteracies.org/library/
Unit 8 - Information and Communication Technology (Paper I).pdfThiyagu K
This slides describes the basic concepts of ICT, basics of Email, Emerging Technology and Digital Initiatives in Education. This presentations aligns with the UGC Paper I syllabus.
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In this webinar you will learn how your organization can access TechSoup's wide variety of product discount and donation programs. From hardware to software, we'll give you a tour of the tools available to help your nonprofit with productivity, collaboration, financial management, donor tracking, security, and more.
Macroeconomics- Movie Location
This will be used as part of your Personal Professional Portfolio once graded.
Objective:
Prepare a presentation or a paper using research, basic comparative analysis, data organization and application of economic information. You will make an informed assessment of an economic climate outside of the United States to accomplish an entertainment industry objective.
2024.06.01 Introducing a competency framework for languag learning materials ...Sandy Millin
http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/iateflwebinar2024
Published classroom materials form the basis of syllabuses, drive teacher professional development, and have a potentially huge influence on learners, teachers and education systems. All teachers also create their own materials, whether a few sentences on a blackboard, a highly-structured fully-realised online course, or anything in between. Despite this, the knowledge and skills needed to create effective language learning materials are rarely part of teacher training, and are mostly learnt by trial and error.
Knowledge and skills frameworks, generally called competency frameworks, for ELT teachers, trainers and managers have existed for a few years now. However, until I created one for my MA dissertation, there wasn’t one drawing together what we need to know and do to be able to effectively produce language learning materials.
This webinar will introduce you to my framework, highlighting the key competencies I identified from my research. It will also show how anybody involved in language teaching (any language, not just English!), teacher training, managing schools or developing language learning materials can benefit from using the framework.
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1. Chapter 6
Visualization as a New Media Literacy
Erin Reilly
Defining Visualization
Every day, visualizations affect what we do. As data increasingly mediates our lives,
visualization allows us all to be inquirers and interpreters so that we can represent data in
meaningful ways. Today, we are able to combine multiple data sets resulting from our
aggregation of knowledge from social media and multiple research resources, which allows us to
philosophize about what we want and how we exist in the world to a wide audience.
Visualization is not a new phenomenon. Scientists have been collecting data to aggregate,
analyze, and quantify information into visual presentations for some time. In the past, scientific
visualizations were equated with numeric data rather than texts, images, and relational networks.
Today, scientific research is not isolated in a lab. New forms of data aggregation and
visualization allow scientists to collaborate across the world and across disciplines to
hypothesize, solve complex problems, and offer new theories.
The use of images as visualizations in mass media is common today. Newspapers, such
as The New York Times, employ an in-house interactive team to create custom visualizations for
journalists to clarify large amounts of information. With the rise of free visualization tools (such
2. as Tableau Public, Many Eyes, Easel.ly) and more accessible data sets open to the public, the
process of making sense of our world and our place in it has become democratized.
Through social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, we now keep track of our actions
and store personal data to better understand our thoughts, interests, and desires. Companies
associated with every facet of life—economy, environment, education, health, transportation—
collect data too. Combined, these companies have given rise to a world made up of pools of
information gathered from multiple digital devices we use every day. Not only do companies
collect data, they also share data with the public through visualizations.
Visualizations help us make sense of data, and of our society and our place in it. The
traditional, top-down means of gathering data and analyzing content we now combine with
grassroots aggregation of opinion and sentiment, or of nuanced actions that reflect what we like
or don’t like. Aggregated data gives us a broader, more complex view of the world provided to
us from multiple sources rather than from singular experts.
Visualization—the ability to interpret and create data representations for the
purpose of expressing ideas, finding patterns and persuading people to take action.
Broadly defined, visualization means the act or process of interpreting in visual terms or of
putting into visible form. But defining visualization as another new media literacy is more
complicated. In 2006, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in
the 21st Century (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2006) was released, where
eleven new media literacies were identified as a set of social skills and cultural competencies to
best equip young people to become full participants in the emergent media landscape and raise
3. public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural
world. From this white paper, a new research group, Project New Media Literacies emerged at
MIT and currently is situated at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. This research group which I
have led since 2007 as Research Director determined that the initial set of eleven new media
literacies was not an exhaustive list and that as our society and cultural exchanges through media
change, so too does the importance of new skills needed to be a full participant in our rich media
landscape.
Adding to the original eleven new media literacies, Visualization as a new media literacy
builds upon information visualization. As defined by Lev Manovich, visualization is “a mapping
between discrete data and a visual representation” (Manovich, 2010). He includes in his
discussion, the understanding of visualization as an important social skill to acquire in that it
bridges the relationship between numeric and non-numeric data.
Visualization as a new media literacy is defined as the ability to interpret and create
data representations for the purpose of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and persuading
people to take action.
Type the word, “Why. . .” in Google’s search box and up pops the most searched phrases,
like “Why is the sky blue?” Traditional search, though, is not the only viable option for the web
users of tomorrow. Netflix recommends movies you’ll enjoy based on past films watched.
Wikipedia’s History page allows you to view the development of any entry back to its formation.
Twitter shows you your friends and those to whom they are connected. Post images from your
vacation and they will automatically geo-locate onto a map to share your journey with others.
Want to make sense of the State of the Union speech? Load it into Wordle and the key themes
will be revealed. Be motivated to make change in our world with artists like Chris Jordan who
4. uses visualizations to issue strong statements about human consumption and waste? Jordan’s
visual images on Gyre, 2009 represent actual statistics relating to 2.4 million pieces of plastic,
which are equal to an estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s
oceans every hour.
Relationship to other New Media Literacies
The Internet provides us with the ability to connect, on a global scale, our ideas, objects and
actions. It provides the venue for fostering collective intelligence—the ability to pool knowledge
and compare notes with others in order to achieve a common goal. The value of data is its ability
to inform or to enable decision and action. Practicing visualization within social constructs
enables us to communicate data effectively so that others can gain new insight into the data we
shared.
With this ability to represent large amounts of data, we use visualization beyond numeric
metrics, such as tables and charts, to make sense of our social constructs. The adage, “A picture
is worth a thousand words,” now includes the hundreds of pictures, hundreds of thousands of
words, and multiple strands of layered stories we can create through visualization.
Computer scientists, designers, and artists like Jonathan Harris use visualizations to
combine humanities with science. While new media offers ways to systematize information, it
also offers a place for people to share and contribute their thoughts, ideas and feelings about
themselves, others and society. In two works, Harris explores “Man in the Machine” (I Want You
to Want Me [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZUaXDm4qik]), an interactive installation
about online dating; and in “The Machine in Man” (The Whale Hunt [http://thewhalehunt.org/]),
5. a “photographic heartbeat” of a traditional Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt consisting of over three
thousand photographs that view the event from multiple perspectives and visual manipulations.
As visualization is more than a static image on a page—it is interactive—it provides new levels
of data representation. It combines quantity and quality (numbers and text) so we can better
understand, interpret and interact with art, science, and society. Visualization uses data as input
and encourages users to manipulate the data, whether to explore a story or an argument, or to
understand and interpret complex problems. Visualization fosters new questions; and often, by
manipulating or combining data sets, new patterns emerge.
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture white paper (Jenkins et al., 2006)
also introduced the concept of simulation—the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models
of real-world processes. As a complement to this idea, visualization provides powerful new ways
of representing and manipulating information. It expands our cognitive capacity, allowing us to
deal with larger bodies of information, to experiment with more complex configurations of data,
to form hypotheses quickly and to test them against different variables in real time. Visualization
can be effective in representing known knowledge or in testing emerging theories.
However, there are differences between simulation and visualization. Simulations create
new data by modeling processes whereas visualizations translate data to evoke relationships. It is
more likely that visualizations allow hypotheses to emerge from play rather than from scientific
ruminations.
While data visualization has become more popular as a field of study, it is still an
essentially rhetorical practice, able to influence people or engender action but only to the degree
that it is leveraged in a larger social, cultural framework. Using visualization effectively also
6. requires it to be complemented with the new media literacy, judgment—the ability to evaluate
the reliability and credibility of different information sources. In other words, does the data
shared in the visualization come from a trusted source? Is it collected in a reliable manner? Is its
release timely and influential? Is it embedded in a good story? Bringing together the new media
literacies of judgment and visualization encourages a balance of participation and
experimentation and offers opportunities to bring the real world into the classroom.
Visualization as a New Form of Literacy
In today’s media-rich world, we cannot think of language (such as print literacy) as the main
means for representation and communication. New modes of meaning have emerged that need to
be taken into consideration when thinking about literacy (Kress, 35). Though it is important to
know how to read and write using traditional modes of communication, the new media literacies
build upon these modes and offer new forms of reading and writing through social interaction
with others. Visualization takes into account the importance of knowing how to read and write
data as images and mediates our interaction with the visual information.
Learning how to read and write visual data will help make literacy accessible to
everyone. Like a lens on a camera, visualizations give us the ability to zoom out for the
macro overview or zoom into the micro view and see the tiniest detail in the original
context of the visualization shared. However, we need to understand which structure works
best with which type of data.
Visualization as a new form of reading and writing can also be identified as a new form
of writing at the structural level. At the structural level, different types of visual methods are
7. used to represent data, which requires the writer to clearly understand which mode of
communication will best represent the inquiry.
Visualization methods provide a systematic graphic format to create, share and codify
knowledge (Lengler & Eppler, 2007). For example, network visualization methods use macro
representations of data. They give overviews of social constructs, the relationship between
people, items or entities. Similar to bar charts found in Excel, network visualizations are readable
by understanding spatial dimensions. The larger the spatial node, the more that node represents
connections to a specific person. If nodes are clustered together, the connection of each node to
the others becomes readily apparent.
Silobreaker is an automated search service for news and current affairs that aims to
provide more relevant results to the user than traditional search-and-aggregation engines. Instead
of listing articles matching a search query, Silobreaker displays people, companies,
organizations, topics, places, and keywords associated with the search; it understands how they
relate to each other in the news flow and puts them in context through visualizations.
The visualization of the network is optimized to keep strongly related items in close
proximity to each other. In this way, the overall arrangement of nodes in the network clearly
represents the connections between nodes (nodes that are far away are weakly related to each
other). In this visualization, the size of a node is proportional to the number of edges emanating
from it.
To interpret the data, however, we also need to read the presentation the visualization
offers so that we can interpret the hierarchy and composition of the nodes as they are mapped
onto the image. Where spatial arrangement has been the primary means of reading visualizations
8. since the eighteenth century, color, saturation, and texture can also support how a fixed spatial
layout (such as the geography of a country) is represented (Manovich, 2010).
A micro representation of data uses a different visualization method all together, like a
phrase net diagram PhraseNet can be used to look at literary styles over the century, to
understand power relations between characters in a story, and to identify alliteration and
assonance in poetry.
PhraseNet explores the relationships between different words used in a specific text. It uses a
simple form of pattern matching to provide multiple views of the concepts contained in a book,
speech or poem. For example, through creating a word graph made from Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice, .the program has drawn a network of words; two words are connected if they
appear together in a phrase of the form “X and Y.”
We don’t know what the characters said or what their actions were, just that they spoke
with each other and which character had the most dialogue based on the size of the character’s
name and the thickness of the arrow in relation to the other characters. So the main characters are
linked, and the positive attributes of the characters form a group. This strategy shows that Darcy,
who is a main character, does not appear in the network. The visualization forces us to ask: Why
is the main character of the novel not represented in the network? What does this absence tell us
about his character? These questions emerge through identifying patterns within the visualization
and offer readers a new way of entering the text.
Challenges to Consider
9. Data can be generated, stored, and used in ways that raise questions like these either well or
poorly. Knorr (1981) questions whether visualization can convince anyone in any specific way
about a text because many interpretations are possible. However, Latour (1983) argues that
visualization supports making the invisible be visible. While it is true visualizations can convey a
story in multiple ways, we must be mindful of the intent behind the data collected and shared
visually.
To be media literate, visualizations should be transparent and allow a de-layering process,
like peeling back the layers of an onion. An example of this process in action is being conducted
at University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab led by Francois Bar. His
research group is currently working to develop appropriate methods for better determining
sentiment through Twitter. To determine sentiment in Twitter, researchers use tools to select
keywords, hashtags (#), and users’ handles (@____) to scrape and catalogue the tweets. The
cataloguing of this data is often broken into positive, neutral, and negative, which can then be
represented visually through spatial placement, color, and size and gives the readers a quick view
of the pulse of the people. Though natural language processing, technology can quickly identify
positive or negative language. When using these methods with the 2012 Presidential Campaign,
Francois’ research group quickly realized the limitations of visually representing sentiment
analysis. The difficulty lies when false positives occur when people tweet language such as
sarcasm. These are harder for a computer alone to determine, and the distributed cognition
between the person and the tools becomes much more important.
Another problem in manipulating and representing data is determining which data to use.
Each day, we add more data to our networked world. In a given month on Facebook, each user,
on average, uploads 70 pieces of content. With half a billion members of Facebook, that’s
10. roughly 35 billion pieces of media shared. The key to overcoming this mass of data input is to
determine what data to leave out.
If we added how much media is created and shared through YouTube and Twitter, you
can begin to see the world of big data that we have entered. In a world of rapid change,
representation is fluid and not static. When trying to represent any data that moves through our
social communities, the schema would not be the same from year to year or, for that matter, from
day to day. The more we add data, the easier it will become for numbers to be meaningless
without context.
An important part of visualization as a skill is the ability to see and understand where
potential points of relationships in the data can be analyzed. This begins with formulating
specific questions to help narrow searches, find points of intersection to review and identify
patterns in the data. Pattern recognition is an acquired skill and research has shown that
encouraging interdisciplinary studies (such as combining art and math, or architecture and
nature) and looking beyond the definitive to the ripples or echoes of decisions may help to foster
this skill.
What might be Done in the Classroom
Educators should encourage students to participate in a community of practice that is interested
in deepening their understanding of visualization. This offers a way for users to pool their
knowledge together toward a deeper understanding of the representations and patterns different
visualizations in discussion offer, and in turn, this provides a historical analysis of the data that
11. will change over time since data continues to grow and therefore constantly changes the results
we identify and can analyze.
A few platforms are Tableau Public, Many Eyes, and MapTube. Though each takes a
different approach to visualizations, they all offer a suite of data visualization tools for you to
create and share visualizations. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg created IBM’s Many
Eyes, and to date it is probably the most robust visualization tool that incorporates many layers
of social features into its platform. People can share comments, datasets, and data visualizations
to support their discussion and arguments, including the ability to make comments on a specific
view of the visualization based on the variables you are interacting with or the filters you have
created to view the visualization. For novice visualization creators, this is an opportunity to offer
a context for the design of the visualization and to receive feedback from others who have more
experience.
Done correctly—using the right tools, data, and appropriate questions—visualization can
promote transparency. By asking the right questions and telling a story, visualizations provide an
outlet to understand the relationship between quantifiable numbers and quality of people’s
opinions and sentiments. Armed with more access to information, visualizations can encourage
people to be active in civic life and turn data into action.
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