Week 8

Christian Swinehart |
  • Tufte Book Report: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  • Right Twice a Day: final crit
  • Exercise 3: A Thousand Suns

Assignment

  • Tufte Book Report #2
  • A Thousand Suns:
    • Run make update in your repository folder to fetch the new assignment
    • Generate three exploratory visualizations based on the spreadsheet data using either Google Sheets itself or other off-the-shelf tools. Place SVG or PDF exports of these charts (after editing them in Illustrator or Sketch) in the process folder and sum up the ‘take home message’ of each in a single sentence in the process/README.md file.
      • If you decide to work with Google Sheets, take a look at the User's Manual. There are demo videos for most of its functionality.
    • In addition, add three pencil sketches to the process folder exploring ways in which you could represent the nuclear testing data without using a map. Focus on what aspects of the data you plan to present, which you will omit, and what needs to be summed, grouped, or averaged in order be most comprehensible.
    • Pick an additional data set that you think would make for an interesting counterpoint to the nuclear testing data. Think in particular about addressing the ‘compared to what’ and ‘so what’ sides of the question in a way that either lets us understand the scale of the main data set, or gives us a deeper understanding of the political regimes, technology, culture, social developments, etc. that were going on during the relevant time periods.
      • Locate a source on the web for this contextual data set and bring it to class
    • Read up on using the preload() and loadTable() commands in the p5 reference; in combination they will allow you to fetch a CSV file and load it into an object called a Table.
      • Try adding some print() statements to the starter code in the project folder to get a sense of how you can pull values out of the table by row/column coordinates, using the names in the header row, etc.
Show Comments