Week 6

Week 6: Visual Communication

Monday, Nov 1

• Today you submitted your first draft blog posts. These are available here (only members of this class have access).

• Today we played DIY Telestrations to show how ideas can be communicated and miscommunicated visually.  Our telestrations are linked below. Link to whole folder.

  • Circus

  • Clog

  • Comedy

  • Coronavirus

  • Doctor Who

  • Earthquake

  • Higher Education

  • Tiny Lava Lamp

  • The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

  • Midterms

  • Password

  • Pentland Hills

  • Professor

  • Textbooks are too expensive

  • Holding Class in Zoom because it's rainy outside

Wednesday, Nov 2

• Review: Visual Communication Examples / Debriefing of Telestrations

  • Slides

• Summary of key ideas

  • Figures can convey very specific information, but can be challenging to control how your audience 'reads' that information.

  • Figures don't have to be photo-realistic to be effective

    • In the maps of the LA Metro and London Tube, geographic realism is sacrificed for clarity in relations between stops. People reading the map don't care about absolute distances, they care about getting off at the right stop.

  • Symbols and icons are especially powerful

    • This assumes the audience interpret the symbols in the same way; different cultures may see symbols differently

    • In the slides: during telestrations, a trophy was used as a symbol for "success" 

    • Icons can show relationships between ideas.

    • In the slides: Leandro Castelao used icons for mirrors and detectors to show how an interferometer works. 

    • Stick figures barely look like human beings, but are a recognizable symbol for a person

  • You have to decide whether a figure is a sentence, noun, or verb. You should make sure that sentence/noun/verb aligns with the message that you'd like to convey.

  • The details you choose to include (or omit) in a figure changes how the audience interprets the figure. Your details signify what is important.

  • It even matters how you chose to represent data. John Snow's map of cholera cases in 1854 is an especially powerful visualization of data because it highlights relational information that addressed his hypothesis that cholera is transmitted through poo-water.

  • Visual explanations: see "flatten the curve" figure and the explanation of gerrymandering.

  • Figures can represent a sequence of steps, e.g. using multiple snapshots in time or lines to indicate motion.  

    • Explanations of magic tricks are a good example.

    • By the way: effective magic is the opposite of clear communication. In magic, you want to misdirect the audience. You never tell them what you're going to do because you don't want them to see where the trick is. For the same reason, you never repeat the same trick. The audience recognizes your authority because you were able to bamboozle them. 

    • In effective communication, you want to say exactly what you're about to do. You want to be clear in how you do it. You give examples, provide a general principle, and then reinforce it with more examples. The audience recognizes your authority because you were able to teach them. 

• Discussion of Peer Reviews, how to incorporate images into your blog post.

• Visualizing Science via Scientific American

• If you want to learn more about effective visualization, you may want to look at the books by Edward Tufte (available at the UCR Library).

Homework

• Due Wednesday: Please read your peer-review blog post #1. Assignments are on our internal page; please go to the right-side of the spreadsheet. A one page response is due Friday (see below). We'll talk about strategies for peer reviewing on Wednesday.

• Due Wednesday: Please complete the Telestrations Debrief survey before class.

• Due Monday (11/8): [submission link] Please submit a one page peer review of blog post #1, assignments are on our internal page.

  • Make sure your review is at most one page long, in any format (e.g. bullet points are okay if that format makes sense). 

  • Start by briefly saying what the blog post is about. 

  • Then give constructive, *actionable* suggestions. Make sure the advice is KIND, but also USEFUL. 

  • End the review post with encouragement, explicitly state what you thought was very strong about the blog post.