{"id":1850,"date":"2015-04-19T11:27:01","date_gmt":"2015-04-19T18:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=1850"},"modified":"2015-04-20T10:41:57","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T17:41:57","slug":"a-fun-way-to-introduce-dh-students-to-dataviz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/a-fun-way-to-introduce-dh-students-to-dataviz\/","title":{"rendered":"A fun way to introduce DH students to dataviz"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As a teacher, I’ve always operated on the assumption that students are primarily interested in each other. Here’s a fun activity that takes advantage of that interest to teach students a little about data visualization. It’s an extremely unscientific Cosmo-style quiz, designed to show students which interests they have in common with each other. It’s just an introductory lesson, but it gives you a fun dataset to play with. You’ll probably want to split this among a few class sessions, since students will\u00a0need at least one full class to just get familiar with Gephi.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s also a good chance to talk about how authoritative graphs like these can look, and whether the data these contain actually means much at all. (Probably not!)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Make a questionnaire for your students<\/h3>\n
\"wpid1844-media_1429464822280.png\"<\/div>\n
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I’d do this about a week before you do the dataviz lesson. I used Google Forms for this. Just to make things more fun, I called it the Mysterious DH Questionnaire. I asked five questions, each of which had five options. The possible answers were literally the first options that occurred to me.<\/p>\n

Of course, you can choose whatever you want; just be sure you have a constrained list of choices (no write-ins).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Make your spreadsheet into a two-mode edge list<\/h3>\n
\"wpid1845-media_1429465322984.png\"<\/div>\n
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Now that you have your data, you want it in three different formats: 1) raw; 2) an edge list for a two-mode network graph<\/a>; and 3) an edge list for a one-mode network graph. To get your two-mode list, use Open Refine to transpose columns across rows<\/a>. The idea is to go from the layout shown in the above screenshot to …<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"wpid1846-media_1429465687328.png\"<\/div>\n
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\u2026 this one. It’s the same data, just rearranged into two columns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Make your spreadsheet into a one-mode edge list<\/h3>\n
\"wpid1847-media_1429466525579.png\"<\/div>\n
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Then, if you want (you don’t have to, but it can help students see the difference between one-mode and two-node network graphs), you can project your two-mode edge list into a one-mode edge list, using Gephi and this tutorial from Shawn Graham<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Make an alluvial diagram<\/h3>\n
\"wpid1848-media_1429467279291.png\"<\/div>\n
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You can do this with the class. Use\u00a0RAW<\/a>\u00a0to make alluvial diagrams from the raw dataset, experimenting with different categories. It’s fun to see the various relationships between, say, book and movie preferences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Make network graphs<\/h3>\n
\"wpid1849-media_1429467435887.png\"<\/div>\n
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When the class is ready, move on to using the datasets to show which students have the most in common. Here’s<\/a> a tutorial I prepared for students to use with this dataset (names have been blurred out). (And here’s<\/a> a Word version of the Gephi\u00a0tutorial, in case you’d like to alter it.)<\/p>\n

Start with the two-mode network diagram, and when the class is ready, move on to the one-mode. Students really enjoyed seeing who had the most in common, examining the communities Gephi was able to detect, and comparing those communities to their own groups of friends.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a teacher, I’ve always operated on the assumption that students are primarily interested in each other. Here’s a fun activity that takes advantage of that interest to teach students a little about data visualization. It’s an extremely unscientific Cosmo-style quiz, designed to show students which interests they have in common with each other. It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-humanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1850"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1868,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions\/1868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}