Assignment 2: DONALD LYONS and NICOLE SULLIVAN

[dalyons3]

Reflection from Nicole:

While I enjoyed designing the experiment and exploring the results, I felt the assignment overall was not highly enlightening. I would’ve preferred an assignment that challenged, refined, or otherwise exercised personal visualization skills, rather than an assignment that sought to define concepts behind visualization. I feel like a great body of work has already been developed concerning concepts of visualization, especially in the graphic and fine art domains of research and education, and that novel research in this field cannot be done justice in the course of such a short time. I feel that the length of time devoted to the experiment necessitated simplicity that, in the end, limited the generalizability and overall insightfulness of the study. I am skeptical of the validity of the results as I am not familiar with the field, its paradigms, or all the assumptions that certain designs carry with them. Thus, I found it didn’t really enhance my personal knowledge or the general public’s knowledge concerning visualization; however, I did enjoy the statistical analysis and visualization of the results.

Reflection from Donald:

I felt that this assignment was helpful in allowing as to expand our perspective on the content by utilizing not only our understanding of the literature and theoretical concepts, but also testing our insight on empirical studies. However, it would have been interesting to have something that was more challenging for developing the actual skill of data visualization as a whole as opposed to just testing our understanding of one or two of the more modular aspects of visualization design.

[bensoltoff]

• Devious experimental design. If I was in condition 3, I'd hate you
• Hard coded images in your .md - boo. If you want to use pander or stargazer, use .html or .pdf output format
• Perhaps the graphs did not visually "pop" enough? I.e. not memorable enough compared to Nigel Holmes' chartjunk but visually captivating approach
• Or maybe peppers are not that visually stimulating to your subjects. Or maybe you could have used pictures of peppers to draw the bars instead of a solid gradient

[bensoltoff]

Sometimes experiments don't turn out as you expect. Good design though