For this assignment we have selected four data sets (available within Canvas under Files/HW_Resources) for you to choose from. Each contains about 150 data cases and roughly 10-ish variables per case. You are free to select any one of the data sets to visualize. Think about how you would represent this data set. What aspects of it would you want to communicate to viewers? How would you represent those aspects? This HW also will be good practice and preparation for our upcoming day about storytelling with data visualizations. Your goal should be to create a visualization that is both effective at communicating the underlying data in order to help people understand it better and that is aesthetically appealing. A good example is the visualization of a year's worth of New York City weather data from the NY Times that we saw earlier in the course. You don't necessarily need to represent every variable -- you may choose a particular angle or aspect to emphasize. A key to this assignment is to figure out what you want to represent (and what to omit) and how to represent that. You may have to abstract and summarize different aspects of the data --- think carefully about this! Of course, the more of the data that you can represent, the better, but don't feel that every variable and value must be shown.

Once you have a design idea for representing the data, you next need to implement that design using Data Illustrator. You likely may need to watch some of the example videos from the gallery page and look through the "Getting Started" documentation. If you don't understand some aspect of the system or you can't figure out how to do something, just ask. We think that the system should be highly reliable, but we can't guarantee that it is totally bug free. If you think you have found a bug, please use the Data Illustrator Google Forum to report it to the research team. For more minor questions, or if you get stuck, you can post a note to our Canvas discussion of the HW.

What to turn in: You should submit that a zip file through Canvas that contains three files within:

• The Data Illustrator project file for your design.
• A png/jpg screen capture of your visualization.
• A one-page pdf file that contains one paragraph explaining your design and how it represents the data, and then one or more paragraphs with a critique of the Data Illustrator system. What did you like and what did you have difficulties with? Was there additional functionality you wanted? Feel free to comment on different aspects of the system.

Grading: We will evaluate the effectiveness of your visualization for communicating the fundamental aspects of the data set. Does it give the viewer a good understanding of the characteristics of the data that you chose to represent? Additionally, we seek some creativity in your designs. Just making a standard bar chart or scatterplot isn't that exciting. Try to produce a design that is appealing and aesthetically pleasing. Ultimately, we are looking for a combination of effectiveness and creativity/appeal. (We do realize that people have differing levels of design ability and experience. Here, we are looking for a good effort, not necessarily some InfoVis conference paper-worthy new idea. Perhaps you can apply some of the ideas that you've learned from class so far.)