Vis for Journalists Fall 2015 Lab/Assignment 1
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Out: Sep 15 2015, 9pm. Due: Sep 22 2015, 9am
- Install Tableau on your own laptop, either with the course
license key or by getting individual student license yourself.
- Work through Vienna
step-by-step tutorial for visualizing two
datasets of Chicago crime 2015, US forest fires. Notes:
- p 2: Make sure to filter by 2015 by checking the box to
the left of the text field after typing in that number,
otherwise you'll download a 1.4GB file instead of a 41MB file!
- p 3: You may need to hit the 'Update now' button in order
to see something
- p 4: The latest version of Tableau appears to work without
needing to wrangle the data, so you may not need to change any
default settings
- p 20: The lat/long coordinates may automatically have the
AVG operator applied to them, if so use the dropdown menu to
change status to Dimension for each of them
- p 20: You may need to change mouse function to a lasso using
the buttons in the upper left of the map in order to select
points.
- p 21: After selecting the color palette you may need to
hit the 'Assign Palette' button to activate it.
- Work through this step-by-step Tableau Intro Music
Sales tutorial. (I
have made minor fixes from the original version.)
- Download one of these two 1033 Program info datasets directly
from Tableau Public using the 'Download Workbook' option, and try
making at least three substantive changes to it based on what you
saw in Robert's demo and what you've learned from the two previous tutorials:
- Browse Tableau Public
and pick three vizes that look interesting to play with.
For each of them, download the workbook and make at
least two substantive changes to try out new features of
Tableau that you had not used before.
- Submit before class time next week.
- Your written reflections on what you've found in the 7
datasets. How could you use the viz for this data: to
tell a story to others, or to get a sense of the story
for yourself as part of investigation? Or do you argue
that you found nothing useful/newsworthy in this dataset?
- Your reflection should be text illustrated by screenshots
of the vizes
you've created. An informal style is fine, but correct
grammar and spelling are required.
- Send in by email by 9am Tue Sep 22, with subject "JOURN
Week 1", in PDF format.
- Time estimate: this assignment is intended to take no more than 7
hours. If you're done early, download Robert's demo
workbook (it's 145MB) and try exploring the Kiva
dataset. Note that this workbook will only run under
Tableau 9.1, which requires Mac OS 10.9 or greater.
Credits: Part one of this assignment is largely based on Torsten
Moeller's Vienna Vis course Assignment 1. Part two is Tableau's
intro dataset. Part three is based in part on Robert Kosara's demo.
Part four uses Tableau Public.
Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Tue Feb 16 18:43:40 PST 2016