Visualization. Critique on January 27th.
This project is concerned with the comprehensive process of visualizing real-world information. You will identify some information of interest and develop software and other procedures to acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact with your data — while keeping in mind essential questions about what information is worth visualizing, what makes it worth visualizing, and how your visualization functions to produce new knowledge and/or make an impact in culture.

Details about this Project’s deadlines and deliverables:

• Monday, January 18: Looking Outwards for visualization. Identify one or two information visualization projects which you admire. They don’t have to be related to what you want to do.
• Wednesday, January 20: Project 1 Sketch due. Have, ready to show, a sketch (or perhaps even a working prototype) of your project. This is also an especially good deadline by which to have finished collecting or obtaining your data. Your sketch/prototype will not be collected.
• Wednesday, January 27: full details below.
  

(1) YOUR PROJECT.
Your project should be described in a Post on the course website. It should include documentation in the form of screenshots, videos, and if possible, a zip containing the project itself. Your project Post should include a written narrative about your project: where the idea came from, how you obtained the data, some discoveries you made along the way, a self-critique (what you think succeeds, what could be improved), etc. Categorize your Post with the category “Project-1″.

(2) YOUR PRESENTATION.
We can expect to have about 20 presentations on Wednesday. (A few people will have excused absences for the TEI conference). That’s a lot. To make this many presentations in 3 hours (with a break!), we will need to keep to strict limits on timing. For this reason, all of your presentations will be limited to 6 minutes and 40 seconds. This is the duration of the renowned and wonderful “Pecha Kucha” presentation format (20 slides of 20 seconds each — see http://www.pecha-kucha.org/).

To help you prepare, I have created some templates for Pecha-Kucha slide presentations for both Keynote and Powerpoint:
https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/pechakucha-powerpoint-template.zip
https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/pechakucha-keynote-template.zip
You don’t have to use one of these slide templates, nor do you have to use the Pecha-Kucha presentation format. But it’s excellent practice for a presentation style which has been adopted in more than 200 cities around the world. Even if you don’t use the templates, you still have to keep your presentation to 6’40”. I strongly encourage you to rehearse your presentation! Upload your slide presentation as part of your blog post.

6’40” is a nice tidy length for presentations, but (sadly) we won’t have time for rich discussions about twenty projects! For this reason, we will use a PiratePad (a shared notepad) to collaboratively author feedback for the presenting students. Make sure to bring your laptop so you can add your comments in real-time.