MA5830 Data Visualisation Assignment 2

Assessment 2 – Creating simple static visualisations

There are eight students who participate in tests for nine subjects. Each of the subjects has been marked from 0 to 100. The students’ performances in each subject that have been tested are shown in the following table:

For this assignment, you are responsible for designing a visual project where you explain and examine the scores in the nine subjects taken by the eight students to a target audience. The target audience is of your choice and can be from the point of view of a lecturer, a student or their parents, and the target audience can be different for each question.

Submission requirement

Your written report should be submitted in PDF form, have at least three (3) questions and answers with the steps you have implemented to visualise the data, along with related screen shots showing the visualisation you used to answer each question. The maximum number of pages for this assignment is 10.

A recommended structure is as follows:

1. Title page (1 page). This is not the same as the task coversheet.
2. Data representation (interpretation of the data types) which may include a table or screen capture (1 page)
3. Description and explanation of the questions, target audiences, choices for Visualisations, marks and channels – the why-what-how framework (3 pages)
4. Referencing (1 page)

Marking Rubrics

• Visualisations should reflect the content and foundation knowledge covered in the topics and readings covered so far in this subject.
• Overall design structure should be effective in communicating to the chosen target audience(s).
• Extra marks will be given for more complex questions and using transformed data from the table.
• Writing should be an acceptable postgraduate standard, provide some insight to the data, be easy to read and be easy to understand.
• The marking will be broken into five (5) categories: Data extraction, creative questions, content of graphs, visuals and overall design.

The recommended steps for completing the assignment are as follows:

1. Ask three (3) relevant questions relating to the data table. Consider who is your audience? What information does your visualisation intend to convey to your audience?
2. When developing questions, try to think of yourself as a data analyst, and consider all of the different kinds of analysis tasks that a person might want to perform.
3. Extract the relevant data to answer each question. For example, you may use nominal and numeric data types to represent data and your data extraction may include mean, maximum, minimum, mode, and so on.
4. Visualise your data: you should select appropriate marks and channels for your visualisations.
5. Check if your representation of the data can answer your questions.
6. Convert your data values to graphical form

You should select the most effective visual encoding to convert data values to graphical form, such as colour, area, chart, etc.

7. Analyse your data visualisation and discuss the insight it provides.

For example, how do your suggested visual encoding approaches support answering the questions you asked above?