Project Check-in 4

Data Collected and Organized ☑️

In the last two check-ins, you wrote a formal pitch and you began thinking through your evaluation systematically with a table to guide you. I then gave you feedback on those, and you discussed your check-ins with your Studio group.

Fourth Check-in

For this check-in, first fill-in / revise / improve, as much as possible, the answers you filled in last time. Those answers are your game plan: they set out what your data is and how you will interpret it.

With that in mind, start by responding to TWO other students on the previous Check-in. Choose students with the least responses so far and with ideas that interest you, preferring to respond to the same students as you did last time. Comment (politely, kindly, clearly!) on the data they collected and give concrete ideas for how they might ask questions of that data and visualize it. Help each other out. As always, others in this class will be commenting on your work–treat others as you would like to be treated.

Second, collect all the data you think you will need, and keep it organized. What this actually means depends on your project of course, but some general tips:

• If the data is already available as a .csv, .tsv, or .json file, perfect. Those can be loaded right into Python
• If the data is something you can organize as a spreadsheet yourself by hand, perfect. Those can be exported to a .csv then loaded into Python. See Excel Tabular Data for an example of the best format for this.
• If the data is already available as large ASCII text (such as the Gutenberg data, Wikipedia, Reddit commens), perfect. Python can scrape that data like we did in Lab 3. Still, let's chat over email since the details depend on the details.

Finally, jot plans for how you might visualize that data. Lab 4's Guided Exercise is a great place that I really encourage you to start from. Regardless, the idea will be to quickly show others what is important about the "story" your data tells. For example, if you have collected data comparing load times from multiple devices, consider creating a bar chart to compare them. (To be clear, the visualization ain't the story. First get the story right, then you have to tell it. And with the right visual, well, chef's kiss, that story is easy to tell.)

In the next check-in, you will put all of this information together into a "like a final draft" of your project. Collecting all your data takes time, so, really, focus on collecting all your data now instead of later. There won't be hardly any time to re-collect data after this. If there's anything you're unsure of at this point, let's schedule a time to meet! It's no problem!

Once you're done gathering your data, post it the discussion board for this Check-in. You may have to upload your data to your Google Drive or OneDrive and share links to it, if it is too big for Blackboard. In the next Check-in you'll comment on each others' data.

Submission

Post your answers/materials for the check-in above to Blackboard to the discussion board for this assignment.

Grading

This check-in is worth 3/100 towards your final grade.