MA1

Assignment 1

Assignment 2

Assignment 3

Assignment Dropbox

Analytical Infographics Design

Overview

The true value of a well-designed infographic is its ability to support data discovery. Using data provided by the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affair and the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Report, you will design analytical infographics that will answer a development policy question, such as:

• What are the interlinkages, synergies and tradeoffs between different targets? For instance, does achieving certain targets increase or decrease the likelihood of achieving other targets?
• What is the relationship of different types of official development assistance (ODA) to the achievement of different MDG targets?
• What characteristics of least developing countries were most relevant to explain the achievement of development goals and targets?

These research questions are only an example; you may come up with your own questions to put your analytical and data visualization skills to the test.

Data

The project should make use of the indicators from the MDG database which can be accessed from here. A tab delimitated downloadable file is available through this link. A comprehensive metadata repository for the MDG dataset is available under this link.

In addition to MDG database, participants are encouraged to use other international sources of official statistics to enhance their analysis (e.g., any series available in UN Data, World Bank Development Indicators, etc.

The resources listed below provide additional information related to the Millennium Development Goal:

• WE CAN END POVERTY [1]
• Millennium Development Goals Report 2015 [2]

Submission Details

The submission must include:

• An analytical infographics in jpg image file and
• A report in pdf format describing your project, which should include:
  • Abstract: A brief summary of the project, with a maximum of 120 words.
  • Problem and Motivation: A description of the problem you have addressed, explaining the why is it relevant, what are the main variables involved, and what development policy questions you intend to address.
  • Approaches: Describe the approaches used for examining and analyzing the data.
  • Tools Utilized: Describe which technologies you leveraged during your project.
  • Results: Describe how the results of your work may contribute to improve the use of data for development.

The analytical infographics prepared should be interpretable without recourse to your short write-up. Do not forget to include title, axis labels or legends as needed!

As different visualisations can emphasize different aspects of a data set, you should document what aspects of the data you are attempting to most effectively communicate. In short, what story (or stories) are you trying to tell? Just as important, also note which aspects of the data might be obscured or down-played due to your visualisation design.

In your write-up, you should provide a rigorous rationale for your design decisions. Document the visual encodings you used and why they are appropriate for the data. These decisions include the choice of visualisation type, size, colour, scale, and other visual elements, as well as the use of sorting or other data transformations. How do these decisions facilitate effective communication?

You are free to use any one of the following visual analytics toolkit or their equivalent to design the static visualisation:

• Tableau
• JMP Pro
• Qlik Sense

This is an individual assignment. You are required to work on the assignment and prepare submission individually. Your completed assignment is due on 7th September 2015, by 8.30am.

You need to edit your assignment in the appropriate wiki page of the Assignment Dropbox. The title of the wiki page should be in the form of: IS428_2015-16_T1_Assign1_FullName.

Assessment Rubric

Students are encouraged to apply the concepts, methods and best practices we had discussed in class, suggestions and comments provides in academic articles and blogs into consideration when you are preparing your assignment deliverable. You will be awarded 5 bonus marks for each extra feature beyond the design specifications. The maximum bonus marks are 10 marks.

Quality of the infographics (20%)

• The overall layout and content of the final infographics designed.

Appropriateness of graphical methods used (20%)

Ablility to extract, transform and load the raw data given and use appropriate graphical methods to detect the expected and to discover the unexpected from the analytical dataset.

Below are examples of aspects that may lead to point deductions:

• Use of misleading, unnecessary, or unmotivated graphic elements.
• Missing reference line.

Quality of graphical furniture (20%)

Ablility to design graphs that conform to the graphical design best practices recommended in lessons.

Below are examples of aspects that may lead to point deductions:

• Missing chart title, axis labels, etc).
• Ineffective encodings for your stated goal (e.g., distracting colors, inking, etc).

Quality of the Write-up (20%)

• Appropriateness and completeness design rationale in write-up such as the graphical principles used to design the graphs and the graph designing process.

Bonus (10%)

Bonus marks will be awarded to submissions that go above and beyond the assignment requirements to produce effective graphics. Examples may include outstanding visual design, meaningful incorporation of external data to reveal important trends, demonstrating exceptional creativity, or effective annotations or other narrative devices.

The Benchmark

Infographic Design

• In The Shadows

Write-up

• Senior example 1 [3]
• Senior example 2 [4]
• Senior example 3 [5]

Reference

• Hey! Your Tableau Public Viz is Ugly *and* Confusing [6]
• Tableau Visual Guidebook [7]
• Guardian Data Blog [8]
• New York Times Infographics [9]
• Wolrd Malaria 2015 Infographics [10]

Assignment 1 Q&A

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