- Due Feb 3 by the start of class
- Create a visualization for the NY Times on animal sleep duration
- Show at least two and no more than five data-points
- Use any media and format you want
- Bring your finished project to class next week
This week, we'll start thinking about the ways that we can visually encode numbers. There are lots of existing formats for displaying data, some familiar (pie charts, line graphs) and some less so (radar diagrams, violin plots). But while they can be very useful for distilling lots of numbers into a meaningful whole, these formats can lack creativity and visual impact when trying to show just a few numbers.
As a way to ease into the more complex work we'll do later, you've been asked by the New York Times to create an illustration showing how long different animals sleep. You can use any media and format you like, so long as you don't use traditional charts of any kind! Your illustration should include two (or more) data-points.
A "data point" is a single value. It may be part of a set of values (what we'd call "data" or a "data set") or on its own (like a statistic).
Start with some research (see Possible Data Sources below for starting points) to identify the data you'd like to work with, create some rough thumbnail sketches exploring ideas, then work on your finished illustration. Feel free to include text, labels, and any other items that will help your visualization tell the story. When done, upload an image of your piece to Canvas.
Note: be sure to keep track of where you got your data from! Later this semester, we'll be including that information in our visualizations and even publishing our own datasets. You can add that now if you like, but either way it's a good habit to start keeping track of everything as you're working.
Above: Sara Piccolomini's infographic showing data about the Titanic and its sinking.
- How Much Do Animals Sleep? from University of Washington
- Read more about sleep in animals on Wikipedia (a great starting point for this kind of work!)
- A list of "fascinating animal sleep facts"
- Info about how various animals sleep
These are intended as starting points, not the only sources you can draw from. Use them as jumping-off points for starting your research and be like a journalist: verify your information using another source, if at all possible.
These examples can all be found in this week's Images folder
- Birds of North America by Pop Chart Lab
- Three versions of the same visualization showing the relative height of a Coast Redwood compared to the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Space Shuttle, and other trees
- Various handkerchiefs from a 1900 mail order catalog
- Adree Lapierre's Seven Summits
- Shark Attack by Ripetungi, making clever use of proportion
- Sara Piccolomini's wonderful Titanic: Facts and Numbers poster (this one does include some traditional visualizations too)