Ask a question, Search for data

Bill’s introduction seeks to set interactive visualization into context by first exploring why visualization is important. He does this by providing many examples that serve his argument with one such example being Anscombe’s Quartet which on paper have similar trends in data but once visualized showed how different the data set appears on a graph. Bill then dives into a history of data visualization and its progression until the internet and how the internet impacted visualization and including its introduction into the scholarly field. Bill also debates theories and methods behind visualization including a list of useful models to creative a valuable interactive visualization project before putting forth his own model which we will be using in this class.

The ASSERT model stands for ask a question, search for information, structure the data, envision the answer, represent the visualization, and tell a story. It’s the first two categories that the class this week is to focus on. My general topic of interest relates to Florida during the paleolithic era moving into pre-Seminole time and my initial reaction is to want to map it in some visually interactive way but I found a static map was already done, and based off of Bill’s recommendations in forming a question I am running into difficulty when looking at a new way to frame this. I intend to frame this as a public history project with the audience being the lay public and this project serving as a point of public education and engagement about the change over time in Florida’s pre-contact period because I often find the dominate narrative claims that the Seminole tribe has lived in Florida for thousands of years https://www.archaeologicalconservancy.org/event/floridas-mangrove-tour-2019/.  With this focus in mind, representing change over time in Florida prehistory, I moved the second stage of Bill’s model.

Searching for information on this topic is something I already have done. Many archaeological journals and press releases exists and were not too difficult to find and each describes the culture surrounding each site. What will be interesting is if any questions come second, as Bill describes it, from the data and finding the best tool to represent this data in a helpful and interactive way to transcend the purpose of the map provided by Florida’s Division of Historical Resources.

Bill’s introduction and first two chapters raise interesting concepts about tailoring a project to an audience.  A scholar that realizes the constraints of k-12 teaching due to standardized testing and their needs being different than that of the lay public, or key interest groups, or graduate students, is refreshing. This awareness of different groups within the public sphere and the attention span, background knowledge, and computer limitations that may be different in each group provide a thoughtful backdrop when it comes to designing the visual aspect of the project or structing the data. I feel that for my project, this will all come together in structing the data and testing different visualization models to determine which audience I’ll tailor the project towards, and which model will help me best tell my story. I feel like this is why Bill’s model is so versatile, because perhaps your target audience is the most important aspect that drives your project, or your data,  or your initial question, and this process for data visualization can lend itself towards all of these aspects and can widen the berth of projects that find this process a helpful.

Question for Bill: Interactive visualization seems to lend itself well to the Public historian’s tool kit. How would you address concerns over ‘Is the format of interactive visualization useful for or as scholarship?’