Syllabus

Our general topic

Our society is generating and accumulating data at an ever faster pace. The ability to understand data and use it to make decisions and predictions is a skill whose importance is growing as well. College graduates, in particular, are often expected to have these types of skills regardless of their major. Fortunately, the growth of powerful digital tools is keeping pace with the growth of data and these tools are getting easier to use. It’s now easier than ever to develop skills to

• Get data (maybe raw),
• Wrangle data (make it palatable),
• Visualize data (make a picture to illustrate something important), and even
• Analyze data (draw conclusions, which is more the realm of statistics).

Often, a picture is the easiest way to illustrate an important idea with data. In this class, we’ll learn how to read pictures, generate some ourselves (often with some interactivity), and publish them in a website.

Put another way, we’ll learn some of the basics of data visualization. As this is a first year seminar with no prerequisites, though, we’ll do it gently and with lots of support.

As this is a first year seminar, we’ll occasionally discuss some topics related to the beginning of your University experience. We’ll have a few outside visitors and I’ll probably encourage you to attend a cultural event.

Materials

We’ll have some reading outside of class but you’re not required to purchase any particular textbook. The number one thing that you do need is access to a reasonably good computer with wifi. We will work together on short computer projects almost daily.

Most days you’ll need a laptop in class! Please let me know, if this is an issue!!

The key digital tools that you’re going to use are

• Discourse
  • Discourse is open source forum software that we’ll use facilitate class discussion. We’ll use it at the beginning of the semester for you to showcase for first steps into digital presentation. We’ll continue to use it as a convenient place for me to organize our work.
• Observable
  • Observable is a company whose mission is to help people make sense of data. They provide tools to make pretty stunning interactive visualizations on the web. We’ll focus on
    • using it to write and
    • using their point and click tools to make some simple graphics.
• WordPress
  • WordPress is the original point, click, and type tool for creating nice webpages. This class webpage was built with WordPress! UNCA has a wordpress site where you can get your own space to create your material. This is where your major class projects will go.
• Datawrapper
  • Datawrapper is another company that helps people build interactive visualizations on the web. Typically, it’s easier to build an impressive visualization n Datawrapper than it is on Observable but the things you can accomplish are more restricted. That is, you can make a really nice visualization as long as it fits one of their specific
• Chat GPT
  • Perhaps you’ve heard of Chat GPT? Well fundamentally, Chat GPT works by spotting patterns in data in an adaptive and contextual way. More generally, artificial intelligence is a developing technology that’s almost certainly going to make an impact on your academic career. Thus, it makes perfect sense for us to discuss it and learn to use it effectively and responsibly.
• Something else?
  • Every semester, I’m amazed by something I learn from a student. I’m absolutely open to you folks exploring things that you want to explore. For example, you might be interested in ArcGIS Storymap, sort of a WordPress on steroids with lots of built in mapping tools. Or you might be interested in Flourish – an alternative to Datawrapper. It’s really up to you.

Topics

The topics we’ll explore in the class likely include

• UNCA and academia
• Elections and politics
• Cartography: thematic maps and slippy maps
• Sports and sports analytics
• Systemic racism
• The pandemic or remembering the bad old days.
• Chat GPT (it’s a tool and a topic!)
• Something else? (At some point, you’ll pick a couple of data sets that you want to explore.)

Digital humanities

This course is part of an initiative in the Digital Humanities here at UNCA. For the most part, this will not really impact your day to day perceptions of the class. There will be short surveys at the beginning and end of the semester, however.

Grades

• Participation
  • You will earn 40 points for simply coming to class regularly.
• In class projects
  • We will have frequent in class projects for five points each. As I expect to have one or two of these a week, you could earn near 100 points on these.
• Larger projects
  • We’ll have two larger projects during the term that will incorporate many of the ideas we develop throughout the term. You’ll work on this mostly outside of the class but still in consultation with me. Due dates and points are
    • Friday, October 20 for 50 points and
    • Friday, December 8 for 80 points.
  • That second due date is our class final
• Odds and ends
  • You might be able to earn a few bonus points by attending select cultural events and writing a short blog post.

Policies

Attendance

I expect you to be in class. Missing class with any regularity will affect your grade – both through the participation grade and our frequent small projects in class.

Late work

As a general rule, I don’t accept late work. That’s my policy. Having said that, I understand that life happens. Please let me know, if you are having difficulty keeping up with the work for any reason.

Academic dishonesty

I’ve got a legalese document that goes into this in more detail but,

Any act of plagiarism, cheating, or use of unauthorized materials or assistance is academic dishonesty.

Please don’t do this! In this class, there’s really no need to. I fully expect that you’ll talk to other folks, consult references, and use computational tools. Just be sure to acknowledge it when you do!

Your rights and responsibilities

Again, I have this legalese document for more details.