Visualization selection
You may not use textbooks or papers on visualization as source material for your critique. Rather, the critique subjects should come from visualization practitioners. That is, people outside the field of visualization, but who employ visualization to communicate information in their own domain. You may use visualizations found on social media provided you are able to track down the original. Please refrain from posting links to social media content. Rather, post link to the original source. For this critique, your visualization should be interactive. It should also be rich enough to make it easier for you to generate a meaningful critique.
To get you started in your search for a visualization, here are potential sources appearing in the news media:
The Guardian: Data Visualizations
Five Thirty Eight: articles with “data visualization” tags
The New York Times: 2018 in Visual Stories and Graphics. Also available: 2017 and 2016
From the blogsphere: Flowing Data.
Do your own research: Use search engines with keywords such as “interactive visualization”, “infographic”, etc… Remember: the visualization you end up choosing need to be interactive. Additionally, do not use materials from Social Media, unless you are able to track down the original source. That is, it’s OK to come across a visualization on social media that eventually links back to an established news source.
Critique
Once you have selected your visualization, explain the data being shown . Describe the visual encodings employed. That is, put into words what the visualization is trying to show. Next, critique the visualization: what works and what doesn’t? Is the visualization clear or is it misleading? Do you like it, and why? What could be improved?
You should evaluate the visualization based on perceptual principles. The best way to go about doing this is to base your critique on the Marks and Channels framework (Munzner’s textbook chapter 5 . You should list the channels used in the visualization and describe the variables that are mapped to the channels. Describe the type of variable used , and discuss whether the channel is a good match for your variable. Your critique should also consider the perceptual accuracy of the channel, and whether the designer of the visualization could have chosen a more appropriate channel.
I expect the outline of your critique document to roughly answer the following:
Introduction and link to the visualization
What data attribute can be seen from the visualization? What questions can we answer with the visualization?
How is the visualization depicting the data? What visual channels are being used to illustrate the different attributes?
How effective is the above visual encodings?
Is the visualization truthful, or does it attempt to mislead? Why?
What is your overall impression of the visualization? Do you like it? Why?
What can you do to make it more effective?
Deliverable
Your written critique document should be about 1 to 1.5 pages in length. For uniformity, your document should use an 11-points Times New Roman font face .
