Fun and Learning with Data Visualization

by Jackie Whiting

Do you sometimes find data overwhelming? I do. I sometimes feel a certain level of ineptitude when it comes to crunching data in a way that tells a valuable story. If you have not seen data tell a story, check out any of the TED Talks by Hans Rosling (https://www.ted.com/playlists/474/the_best_hans_rosling_talks_yo)—and the organization he founded: Gapminder (https://www.gapminder.org/) to see how engaging, informative, and curiosity-inspiring such stories can be.

Even if spreadsheets make you cringe, this post will, quite literally, help you see data in an entirely new way. And if you are a fan of modern art, a doodler, or sketchnoter, if you appreciate the potency of a good infographic, this post combines all of those things in a unique form of correspondence.

For the last couple of years I have casually perused Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data: A Friendship in 52 Weeks of Postcards. The book is wonderful, and if you still have some patience for screen time, the companion website (www.dear-data.com/theproject) is equally engaging. Now, as I begin writing this post during a pandemic-induced housebound winter break, I am seeing Lupi and Posavec's project again through a new lens. As we expand our attention to the mental well-being of our students, our colleagues, our friends and family members, and ourselves during these months that are straining us in extraordinary and unprecedented ways, I am seeing these postcards as a kind of mindfulness exercise and an almost therapeutic means of creating connection despite unavoidable geographic isolation.

Each Monday, the pair chose a subject—anything from complaining, to sounds, to shopping, or urban wildlife—and collected data for that week. Then, each transcribed the data into a hand-drawn visualization on a postcard which they then snail-mailed to each other. They did this for a whole year. Reminiscent of the fictional Griffin and Sabine series, the collection of their postcards and reminiscences is an autobiographical documentary in which we witness the evolution of their self-reflection and the unfolding of their relationship with each other and the people in their individual lives.

Imagine your students building a list of subjects and each week examining their own lives and experiences to collect data on the designated topic. Imagine your students also in a moment of quiet reflection and contemplation; perhaps you start by collecting data about moments of gratitude. They could create hand-drawn postcards or digital ones. Their visualizations could be collected on a Google Site or published with Book Creator. Your learning community could connect with a nursing home in your community or partner with your community library to connect data pals for correspondence. Now that we have passed the holiday shipping rush, hopefully your local post office will have the capacity for such a project!

Of course there are many digital tools for crunching and displaying data. While I am still a novice at using it, I love seeing what educators (and others) are doing with Google Data Studio (https://datastudio.google.com/), a new-ish data visualization tool that draws data from one or more Google Sheets to create all sorts of maps, graphs, and charts with which your data viewers can interact. For example, as a viewer of a data display in Data Studio, you can modify the time frame across which a data set is displayed which can significantly alter the impression that data makes.

Looking at how they can manipulate their own data also helps students bring greater scrutiny to data they encounter in their research. In her column, "Adding Friction. How Can I Teach Students to Think of Numbers as Evidence Rather than Answers?" Debbie Abliock provides guidance on how to help students think critically about data and its sources—even when looking at, as she says, "something as 'simple' as the population of a country. (To this end, if your students fall victim to mis-contextualized or manipulated presentations of data, they—and you—might find Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations at www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations useful and amusing.)

All of which reminds me of Kristin Fontichiaro's column "Nudging toward Inquiry. Dancing with Data," in which she describes six tenets for developing data literacy, the first of which is: "It's healthy for students to talk back to data." In fact, displays of data are excellent for inspiring and sustaining inquiry. As students practice reading statistics and locating and analyzing information that contextualizes those numbers they become data literate. In our conversations about the literacies that are essential future-ready skills, we must, in the era of infographics and animated visualizations, include data literacy.

If you are interested in dabbling in the art of data visualized communication, Lupi and Posavec also have a visual journal that serves as a guide for creating artistic visualizations of data in your day-to-day experiences and interactions as well as a postcard kit so that you can correspond with your modern art data penpal. Here is what a week of caffeine consumption looks like in my life.

Each bean represents a shot of espresso and each bag is a mug of tea. The colors indicate the time of day of caffeine consumption. You can see that I have also added notations for how my caffeinated beverages were otherwise enhanced or flavored. Are you a consumer of caffeinated beverages or food stuffs? Feel free to share your data visualization here, too!