Formal proposal milestone

Now that you’ve gotten your datasets and your responses to the “What?/Why?” questions approved, it’s time to formalize your proposal. You can think of this as creating a feasible “roadmap” plotting out exactly how you’re going to take the proposal from its current state (an idea in your heads) to an implemented final product. Don’t worry if that sounds daunting; we are here to help you. You will receive feedback two more times:

• After you submit this proposal.
• After the Work-in-progress milestone: Work in progress submission where most of the visualizations and narrative are developed in some form but not finalized. This is not a rough or first draft, and requires significant effort.

Note

This proposal is to help you set a plan. Plans change, and if they do, don’t worry. You do not have to tell us if milestones or dates change, but you do have to tell us if your topic idea fundamentally changes as you are working through the project.

From Datasets to (Planned) Visualizations

You all did a great job making sure that your datasets contain a wide variety of data types. As a reminder, the types that we emphasized for your initial proposal were:

• Qualitative and quantitative data
• A time element
• A geospatial element
• A text element
• A relationship element (the ability to be transformed into a graph/network)

And in each of your proposals you found datasets that covered a sufficient portion of these five types.

Now, your first task is to start applying the aspects of data viz design that we’ve covered thus far, by explicitly addressing the following three points, and by developing milestones relating to these points (as detailed below, after the descriptions of the three points):

1. Analytical approach

Explain in more detail (or add detail if we requested) to the what and the how based on your dataset proposal. Please outline the analytical questions you wish to explore in the narrative, and your preliminary analytical approach.

2. Think about your audience

We like the idea that your visual narrative’s goal should be to allow a general audience to read your narrative and use the visualizations to learn something about the topic you are writing about.

You should focus on the concepts from Week 2. In particular, you should address the material on designing for an audience:

• What are the important pieces of context that your audience will need to have? And among these:

  • Which can you assume that your audience already has?
  • Which do you think your audience may be aware of generally but will need particular details about?
  • Which do you think they will be totally unfamiliar with?

For example, if you were planning to develop a project around data on food recipes around the world, here are some things to consider:

• We assume that our audience already has knowledge of their local cuisine, for example the cuisine they eat every day in school lunches or at home
• We think (given the demographics of DC) that our audience may also be generally aware of some aspects of Ethiopian and Salvadoran cuisines, but (for example) we may want to give them details on how these particular cuisines fit into broader “categories” of global cuisines that we might use as labels/groupings in our visualizations
• We think our audience may be totally unfamiliar with some of the technical details of how macro-level “groupings of cuisines are classified—for example, specifics about the gastro-molecular combinations that characterize different spices, soups, beverages, etc., and their distribution across various continents and subcontinents—so that we should provide a significant amount of context if we decide to incorporate these factors into our visualizations in some way.

The second factor your proposal should address comes from Week 3:

3. How will you provide context?

i.e. what mode(s) of interactivity, plot elements, etc. will you focus on?

For example: if geospatial variables play a key role in your dataset and your What/Why answers, you should address:

• How exactly will you represent these variables?
• Will you need a map of the entire globe? One country? Or will users be able to move between different maps (or bring different maps into the “main” view) interactively?
• Will it need to be 3D, or will a 2D projection work better?
• Do the answers to your What/Why questions indicate that detailed satellite-imagery maps would be appropriate? Or, would maps that just display major roads, or just display boundaries between sub-regions, be better for your goal(s)?

Finally, shifting attention from Weeks 1-3 to the more recent weeks in the course:

4. Think about the narrative genre

Think about the common visual narrative genres discussed. Which genre(s) do you think will be the most effective for your narrative?

5.Think about the tools learned to date

We’ve covered a bunch of tools and libraries. While there is no requirement to use a specific tool, we do expect to see you use the tools beyond the basics.

For example:

• If you think your project might revolve around a dashboard-style interface, you may need to spend more time learning how the Observable JS data “flow” model works, since you’ll want to make sure that user interaction events like (Zoom In/Zoom Out) or (Clicking on a country name to highlight its line in a broader line plot of countries) propagate through the DOM, updating each of the elements of the dashboard to reflect the new state, which is precisely what OJS is able to do “automatically”!
• If you instead think that a scrolly-telling approach is the best way for you to achieve your What/Why goals (relative to the audience you have in mind, as specified above), you may instead want to focus your attention on libraries which exist to help implement these types of visualizations—Pudding.cool has an article listing out some of these.
• Since learning these libraries on top of OJS, Plotly, etc. may be overly-ambitious given the time you have to create the project, however, you may instead just want to focus your time on how e.g. a functionality already built into Quarto could be effectively leveraged: if you opt for a slideshow-style visualization, for example, you should spend some time becoming familiar with the section of Quarto’s documentation detailing the features of its integrated Reveal.js support.

6. Concrete Milestones

Finally, your proposal should include a table with at least three milestones you will aim to accomplish (related to the above three points) with a specific projected date for each milestone.

For example, if you know that you want to design a dashboard-like interface, one of your milestones could be to create a mockup/prototype by a certain date, illustrating what the dashboard will look like. You should provide as many specifics as possible, for example, rather than just “mockup by March 15”, you should include detail on what app or program or website you will use to create the mockup (e.g., Canva or Adobe Illustrator, if you think either of these will be helpful for creating your particular mockup), which members will be responsible for accomplishing this milestone by the due date, and how these particular members will keep other group members up-to-date on progress relating to the milestone(s).

Submission Instructions

Write a 2-3 page document that covers all the areas outlined here and save it as a PDF file. You will submit the PDF through Canvas.