Visualizing Public Life
A Student Competition at Calvin College, 2012-2013
INTRODUCTION
One of the key challenges of the digital age is to use advancements in computing power to produce meaningful information. We now have a range of remarkable tools to help us transform raw data into refined interpretations. Yet the use of these tools is too often uninspiring at best and exploitive and obfuscating at worst. It is no wonder that businesses, scholars, media outlets, and non-profits are increasingly seeking to visualize information in ways that are both innovative and edifying. Visualization through complex mapping, charting, and other graphical representations has become a perpetual frontier in computer-assisted analysis of human preferences and interactions.
The Henry Institute, in partnership with Calvin’s Center for Social Research, is spearheading an effort to provide incentives for students to explore various approaches to visualizing information about public life. Our understanding of both “information” and “public life” is capacious, encompassing a variety of information sources and the myriad ways citizens share responsibility for public goods. As a result, we hope this initiative will engage students with wide-ranging interests, providing opportunities for participants to work collaboratively across
disciplines and thereby exposing them to different competencies and perspectives.
As described below, the initiative will culminate in a juried competition and show of student-produced visualizations in spring 2013. But we emphasize that this is an endpoint: students will engage in a process, commencing in the fall, that will include a workshop and, in some instances, tie-ins to regular coursework.
GOALS
The goals of the initiative are both practical and normative. We not only wish to help students develop aesthetic and technical competence in interpreting and producing good visualizations (that is, maps, charts, etc.), but also to foster moral discernment about how those visualizations are produced and interpreted.
From a practical perspective, student participants will have opportunities to develop a variety of desirable professional and civic skills. These skills include technical expertise, numeracy, effective communication, and collaboration. The initiative will, at the very least, expose students to basic elements of data visualization and a variety of cutting-edge tools currently used in business, scholarship, and media. Some students will go beyond mere exposure and advance to greater
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technical competency within their chosen disciplines. Many students will also take advantage of the opportunity to work collaboratively across disciplines, providing even more openings for learning. From a normative perspective, student participants will have opportunities for moral reflection about how they visualize public life. Edward Tufte, one of the most incisive commentators on the visual display of information, points out that presenting evidence on any complex phenomenon is a “moral act.”1 It requires that both producers and consumers consider how data are collected,
stored, manipulated, and represented, which raises a host of questions about quality, relevance, and integrity. Clearly, as Christians who are called to love our neighbors and serve the Kingdom of God, we have a stake in offering answers to these questions.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS
We seek to accomplish these goals by facilitating a process that will result in students designing and producing their own visual displays of data about some aspect of public life. During this process, students will be provided with several opportunities.
The culminating experience will be a juried competition and public display of student
visualizations in late winter 2013. A group of scholars and practitioners will evaluate student work, and all submissions will be displayed in a show to coincide with the annual Henry Lecture in March. To provide some extrinsic motivation, the Henry Institute will provide a modest amount of prize money for the selected best work.
Before the competition, students will have opportunities to develop their projects with the help of campus resources, the most important of which will be a Visualization Workshop sponsored by the Center for Social Research in October and November 2012. Each student who wishes to participate in the competition will be expected to attend the workshop. The objectives of the Workshop include: (1) identification of key questions or puzzles students might want to explore in their projects, as well as possible data sources; (2) student exposure to various approaches used in the visual display of quantitative information; (3) the introduction of CSR and other campus resources for completing the project; and (4) the development of collaborative teams, where appropriate.
In addition, student participants can expect support after the Workshop. Numerous faculty on campus have committed to support student work, as needed; some have indicated a willingness and interest in integrating the project into course curricula (see below). The Center for Social Research will be an ongoing resource, particularly by committing a Research Assistant as a support person for student participants. The Director of the Henry Institute will also work with students
throughout the process, especially focusing on research design (e.g., forming research questions, understanding relevant literature, identify data sources).
PARTNERS
The Henry Institute will spearhead the competition through advertising, workshop participation, research support, logistics, and funding. Director Kevin den Dulk, with support from Program Coordinator Ellen Hekman, will provide the key leadership for the competition.
The Center for Social Research is offering the Visualization Workshop, as well as committing to provide staff support for students as they work on their projects. Director Neil Carlson, who has been an important part of the planning process for the competition, is the point person at the Center.
Numerous faculty experts in relevant disciplines have offered to integrate the competition into their curricula through advertising and, in some cases, assignments. This co-curricular element of the competition is crucially important. Some examples of faculty (and their relevant courses) who have consented to participate in some way include:
Jason Van Horn (Geography): Introduction to GIS Kathi Groendyk (CAS): Visual Rhetoric
Mike Pelz (Political Science): Political Science Methods Rachel Venema PENDING (Sociology): Stats and Methods
Bob Eames (Business), Frank Speyers (Art/Design), Keith VanderLinden (Computer Science) are also speaking with colleagues about tie-ins
IMPORTANT DATES
September 2012: Identify student participants (Henry Institute; faculty in courses) October/November: Visualization Workshop (Center for Social Research)
Late February 2013: Student submissions due, judging
ILLUSTRATIONS
Here are some examples of the kind of visualizations we hope will inspire Calvin students to critique and create.
Figure 1 is the winner of a “Biz Viz” competition sponsored by Tableau Software that offers an image of the disparity in changes in income between quantiles. This example is powerful, but lumps the bottom 90% of income earners together and may not adequately clarify whether the
disproportionate gains for the top quantiles are due to political advantages to wealth or to basic financial realities that apply to all such populations.2
Figure 1 “The Great Divide,” winner of the Tableau Public “Biz Viz” competition
2 The original, interactive Great Divide visualization is posted online at
Figure 2 is a website capture of the Grand Prize co-winner of the U.S. Department of
Transportation’s “Data Visualization Student Challenge.” The actual visualization is a series of dynamic, interactive graphics that, in the author’s words, “highlights the increases in bicycle commuting and safety correlated to increases in government spending.”3 The interactive version
allows users to move a slider that shows change in bicycling trends over time in three areas: (1) within states; (2) across states; and (3) between men and women. While this visualization alone does not suggest clear explanations for variations in these areas, other graphics in the series connect commuting to bicycle safety and its relation to public policy.
Figure 2 “Bicycle Commuting in the United States,” winner of the US DOT Data Visualization Student Challenge
All data used is taken from the American Community Survey (2005-2010) via The League of American Bicyclists.
3 The original, interactive “Bicycle Commuting” visualization is posted online at http://korynorthrop.com/flash/bicycle-commuting-trends/. To see the Grand Prize co-winner’s visualization, which represents a sophisticated model of transportation finance, see http://www.runthemodel.com/models/k-0dLihGR8n856SyMzy9H4/. All submissions are here: http://dataviz.challenge.gov/submissions.
