Today in Class: Visualizing Data and Data-Driven Narratives
Readiness Quiz and Attendance — Section 2
Complete the Section 2 readiness quiz and attendance check. Enter the attendance code announced in class.
1. Finish Last Week’s Notebooks
Use our opening time to finish or revisit last week’s two notebooks. Get the course copy from Professor Elkins’s GitHub, then open it in Colab to work.
- Spotify and Matplotlib Lab: GitHub notebook • Open in Colab
- Loops and Big-O: How Does the Work Grow? GitHub notebook • Open in Colab
2. Famous Historical Visualizations: Group Investigation
Each group will examine a different historical visualization and explain its central idea to the class. Ask:
- What information or argument does the visualization present?
- How do its visual choices organize that information?
- What becomes visible here that might be difficult to see in prose or a table?
- What context, limitations, or assumptions should a viewer know?
Choose or receive one:
- Joseph Priestley: A New Chart of History (1769)
- Florence Nightingale: Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East (1858)
- Charles Joseph Minard: Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 (1869)
- W. E. B. Du Bois and his Atlanta University team: examine these four visualizations as a cluster:
- Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgia
- City and Rural Population, 1890
- Land Owned by Negroes in Georgia, 1870–1900
- Proportion of School-Age Children Enrolled in Public Schools
Shared question: Taken together, what argument do these visualizations make about Black life and progress after emancipation—and what inequalities remain visible?
3. Who Becomes Visible in Data?
Discuss: Who is treated as the default? Who or what becomes invisible when data are not collected, when categories do not fit, or when differences are averaged away? Can adding more data solve the problem, or must the categories and institutions also change?
4. Nicolas Cage: Visualization as Cultural Argument
Explore “The Five Types of Nicolas Cage Movies” (archived copy). How do classification and visual design turn a collection of films into an argument? What choices did the authors have to make, and does the result persuade you?
5. Pick Your Favorite Visualization
Browse either Tableau’s Viz of the Day gallery or Information Is Beautiful. Choose one visualization you think works especially well. Be ready to explain what it makes visible and how its design, context, and storytelling—not just its appearance—shape your response.
If Time: Different Approaches to Visual Storytelling
Compare how these examples use scale, interaction, narrative, classification, and institutional context: