Task 9

Task 9 - Visual Representations of Data

Using these visualizations as prompts, reflect on the political implications of such groupings considering what data is missing, assumed, or misinterpreted. For example, while you may be able to justify your musical choices in the Quiz, there also may exist reasons why you did not chose other pieces. Can the reasons for these "null" choices ever be reflected/interpreted in the data?

I found this task the most difficult one I have attempted. This was likely linked to also finding a portion of the module content very difficult. I very much enjoyed the video, "A Journey to the Bottom of the Internet". That one was informative and eye-opening. I had no idea there were so many underwater cables, how they were made, or what that laying them was still a current thing. I somehow had the idea that cable was old-fashioned, and most data now travelled around the globe through the air via satellite. I was quite intrigued by how cables were made, how they were laid, and the map showing just how many were out there. I actually would have liked to watch a longer documentary. Who owns all the cables? Who do they connect to? Is there sabotage of cables? Or spying via "hacking" a cable"? It reminded me of the show, "An Honorable Woman" where spying via secret attachments to cables was a big plot driver.

However, the other two videos by Systems Innovations was quite hard for me to follow. In reading some of the other's comments on class, I could see people were using the terms used in the videos - nodes, graphs, edges, etc. to interpret the data - but I honestly couldn't remember exactly what each one was or what it meant. So that was possibly a factor in not really understanding much of the graphs, though not the whole issue. I also have a bit of a visual impairment, so I had to blow the images up quite a lot, so could only see pieces at a time. when looking at the whole image, I couldn't read the labels of judge the thickness of the lines in image 1 well. I could tell some were thicker - for example Katie Cowen and I seemed to have a thick line, which I'm fairly confident meant we had a lot of overlap, however it was hard to tell if this was the thickest, or as thick as some others. If I were to really need to use this data for an education purpose, I would have needed either the numerical data to compare, or another type of representation. I could see the color, so I noted everyone was grouped in threes with a color, and Katie, Jennifer and I all had orange. But I didn't know if that meant we were most strongly linked with each other, and if so, if everyone is in 3's, was there different strengths of links between people in other color groups?

I was left with more questions than understanding. I think I felt unsure of what purpose there was to representing data this way. It shows lots of connections, however, I don't think the graph was necessary to know that. With a select group of people making a set number of selections from a set list of this size, knowing there would be lots of links, of varied strength was a given, but since I had a hard time with comparing the links, that was as far as I got.

On the third image, I did find it interesting to see which musical selections were chosen most - that I could see easily as they made their way around the circle in order, but I found the grey lines to people very hard to follow and again, unsure what to make of that.

As to the question of if / how the reasons for null choices could be represented, I would say not. In truth, from the graphs I don't see a way to find the reasons for why the s=strongly selected ones were chosen. People's reasons don't seem evident to me in correlation to how often a piece was chosen. Beethoven's Fifth was the most popular, but I can't say why. Was it because its quite recognizable from use in movies and advertising? That would be my guess, but I can't prove that from the graph. And if I can't see a pattern for why people made choice to include, I have no way of guessing why they may not have included others, other than going to a bias that perhaps others had similar reasons to me, such as thinking one Beethoven was enough. But that would just be an assumption that others thought my way. Someone could have just as easily put the selections in alphabetical order and chosen the first 10 that way. Or ordered them by length and chosen the longest or the shortest.

I think my overall takeaway was that displaying something visually doesn't necessarily make it easier to understand. We have heard the saying a picture is worth a thousand words, however, that isn't always true if the viewer doesn't understand the image. Ernesto probably could have explained one of the graphs to me in a way I understood in less than a thousand words. So I did think about what assumptions I might make as a teacher when including images in my classwork and assessments. I'm big on putting visuals and audio and video in my lessons and assessments, and I have been conscious of challenges for students to listen to audio or view video when they are ESL or have a processing delay. We know students with dyslexia have a hard time accessing text. But I hadn't given much though to interpreting images, other than recognizing when some students might have difficulty pacing something in context - political cartoons for example are big on the standardized PAT's and diploma's and can be hard for student new to the country to connect to, or those who don't have a wide political world view. But just understanding the visual itself was not something I had paid much attention to. Is there the equivalent of visual image-related dyslexia? Color blindness or color appreciation? Can all students see color on a map? Of judge variances in a grey-scale map or image? If they didn't learn interpreting data on bar graphs or pie charts in math, and it's not a skill we explicitly instruct in Social Studies, can they read a graph? Can they interpret the artistic choice of angle, focus, color in a photograph source if that hasn't been explicitly instructed? My final thought it was assumptions are made, and how much might student lose out on with those assumptions?

Cheers,

Katherine