The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Tag: sk9

What Should I Do Throughout My Day to Play Better Chess?

Student Posts

I tried to figure out what things throughout my day impacted how I played chess. I always play about an hour of chess everyday, so I decided to record how many wins, losses and draws I had and the types of games that I played. Sometimes I would win or lose based on an outplay but other times it would end because a player ran out of time. I also recorded how I spent my day and how happy I was to see if there was any correlation.

In terms of results, I found out that I won more games and better games (outplay oriented instead of time oriented) when I studied more, had more classes and had more physical activity. The physical activity makes sense but the studying and classes surprised me. I thought I would be tired of thinking from classes and slack off in chess, but that didn’t seem to be the case. I am also surprised that sleep and mood did not play a huge role for my win loss ratio. I was also surprised that my puzzle rush score (a chess related warm up game that I played before my games) did not correlate with any of the statistics as well.

I was able to answer the question that I asked. What I do throughout my day definitely impacts how I play chess. Rating my day on a scale of 1-10 was super difficult because my mood fluctuates heavily throughout the day and it was hard to find an unbiased point where I could logically rank it. I chose the three graphs as shown below to organize and compare my data. The first two graphs organize the data shown in the charts below. I made the first chart by category as opposed to by day because there were too many categories in play. My third graph is analysis of the data. I made it to compare day by day instead of by category. These visualizations show that I am a very logical person and love ranking things. I am always the type of person to rank just about everything in my day to day life. I think I would go about this experiment similarly; I would just add social interaction with friends. I think there might be some correlation there. In my opinion, this was a very valuable tool for self analysis!

Here is a link to the rubric!

11 Hours of Sleep is not Productive

Student Posts

I struggled to determine what and how I would measure this Sunday sketch. After a long process of internal debate, I realized I am most curious about how productive I am day to day, and whether my level of productivity is dependent on how much sleep I get or the time of day. Especially with Spring semester course signup around the corner, it is beneficial to at what time of day I am most productive. What I valued most while collecting data was waking up and counting how many hours of sleep I had gotten. It was nice to have a concrete understanding of how many hours I am getting on average. I also must admit that occasionally the prospect of having to input data on how productive I had been made me want to be a little more productive in times when I typically lack motivation.

My data collection, via notes on my iPhone, is relatively inconclusive. During the past two weeks when the data collection occurred, I was in very different places. I averaged the data between the two weeks, but in reality, I was much happier and energized in the first week and quite sick and fatigued in the second week (hence the 11 hours of sleep!). I also must admit that my definition of productivity was more of a feeling of general accomplishment than a concrete measurement based on hours of work or numbers of assignments completed. I decided to base it on a feeling because that is what I believe affects me more, how I feel about what I have done, not what I have or haven’t done. As I continued to input numbers as the days went by, I began to create something of a base sense of productivity to base my measurements off of.

Once I had all of my data, my next biggest challenge was to show my findings in a simple format. Since I have not been feeling well, I have to be realistic about my ability to focus and must play to my strengths. I am good with pen and paper and unfamiliar with web design, so I decided to stick to my notebook. I have always found bar graphs to be clear and concise and I separated my data into three parts for easy comparision. I found that I am typically more productive in the hours between noon-midnight. I also discovered that I get a similar amount of sleep each night, and when I get much more sleep than normal (11 hours), I am less productive. I wish I could continue this study throughout the year and incorporate more elements such as exercise. I feel that most of my data is relatively similar and heavily relys on my class schedule and health and therefore is not the best indicator of what truly effects my level of productivity.

How Productive am I?

Student Posts

This was definilty the most challenging Sunday Sketch I have done so far. Not only coming up with something to track but then also recording it. I spend about an hour trying to do it electronically, before finally deciding to do it on paper.

Productivity is a very general term, so first I decided to define what it meant to me. I defined productivity as making a good use of my time and completing a specific task. That could be many things, like doing my homework or cleaning my room. After that I had 5 categories to track. Those were being productive in class, homework, club work, exercising, and an other thing that was productive.

Groove-o-Meter

Student Posts

To discover just how disco-groovy my week is, I decided to measure how often music is a part of my day-to-day life, and as it turns out, I was boppin’ a whole lot. Eighty-four percent of my week’s hours were spent grooving, which in a way makes sense, for I often use tunes to give myself that motivation to get stuff done.

I decided not to include my morning alarms as music, despite it consisting of a song, since I usually shut it off real quickly anyways. Also, I forgot to record my Wednesday, so I substituted a second Sunday to fill in that final seventh spot. How groovy is my Wednesday? We’ll never know.

Creating the graphic took a rather long time, and in hindsight, I probably should have just drawn it on a sheet of paper. I had to stack multiple images in order to show the full infographic because downloading it was locked behind a subscription fee for infogram.com. Although if you’d like to see the full infographic as one complete image, you can click here.

All in all, I think the Groove-o-Meter does a good job measuring my daily groove, and I am excited to listen to some more bops as soon as I’m done uploading this in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Sketch 9: Data viz from everyday life

Sketches

Due: 11/10

Tag: sk9

When Mason Currey wanted to understand how he could manage to produce more creative work despite the challenges of everyday life, he set about studying how a bunch of other famous creative people organized their daily lives and what routines they established for their own creative work with the assumption that there were valuable lessons there. Daily Rituals was the result of that research — and then a number of different people and organizations have set out to visualize the insights of that book so that we can see larger patterns in the midst of all this biographical information. Podio’s graphic, which is the feature image on this post, is one of those (check out their site for the interactive version)

For this sketch assignment, you will choose one concept in your life that you want to analyze, something that is not already easily and obviously measured, or doesn’t vary within the span of a day or a week (good categories: awesomeness, mindfulness, healthiness, creativity, productivity, and similar … bad categories: number of steps, hours of sleep, caloric intake, how good is my eyesight?). Decide on a set of about 5 categories that you can use to measure that concept in your life and track those categories for a week or more, then you will produce a visualization of the data that you have gathered and use that visualization to help you understand something about your own life that might not be obvious from your own day to day activities.

Tracking Data

If you’re looking for suggestions about what to track, browsing the “quantified self” tag at Lifehacker might be worthwhile.

Once you’ve got categories, create a spreadsheet where you can track those categories throughout the day. Either take notes in a journal or on your phone and enter the results into your spreadsheet at set intervals, or make the spreadsheet in Google Drive and access it from your phone, or use the site Trackthisforme, or install a tracker app on your mobile device (I found some by searching for “quantified self” apps).

In “How to Track Everything in Your Life Without Going Crazy” and “Fill Out This One-Minute Form Every Day and Find Out Why Your Life Sucks (or Doesn’t)” Adam Dachiss has some useful suggestions for measuring stuff in your life. “Why You Should be Tracking Your Habits and How to Do It” by Belle Beth Cooper is also useful. However, all three of those articles are a few years old now and might not be perfectly applicable.

Whatever method you use, the key activity is to decide what you are going to pay attention to and then to create a system that is manageable for your life for the span of a week wherein you will quantify information about your self or your behavior.

For example, one step of this process might be to decide to measure how happy you are and to create a spreadsheet with a column for “Happy.” Then when you wake up in the morning, while you’re waiting for the coffee to brew, you’ll pull up the spreadsheet and enter a number between 1 and 10 indicating how happy you feel. You will continue adding rows at some set interval (every hour maybe). You will probably have some columns that are a little less subjective than “how happy do I feel right now?” (like “how many times did I talk in class today?” or “how much time did I spend studying?” “how many minutes have I spent looking at my phone in the last hour?”). You can decide how objective or subjective your categories are, but recognize that those decisions will impact the sorts of conclusions you draw from this process.

For now, you just need to decide what you will track and then to be as meticulous and careful as you can be about actually tracking this information either directly into a spreadsheet or in a format that can easily be transferred into a spreadsheet at the end of the week.

Visualizing that data

Now that you have gathered your data, it’s time to analyze it further and visualize it.

With the data set that you’ve gathered, which is just for a week or so and only with a handful of variables, you probably won’t need a computer or special tools to analyze it. However, you might find loading your data into a spreadsheet (like in Excel) if you haven’t already been keeping it in that format will help you a lot to analyze it and see patterns in the data.

Because this is an assignment about collecting data about your own life, there is room for you to decide how “scientific” you want to be with your project. Even if you have never used spreadsheets for much of anything, try to quantify your data as much as you can and make an effort to be detailed and accurate with your information, but that said the types of data you chose to collect and the category you’ve decided to study will have a huge impact on the type of analysis you undertake. It is okay for you to have some more subjective categories and it’s okay if your final analysis or visualization is somewhat subjective too.

Tools

There are numerous methods you can use to create your visualization — anything from paper and crayons/markers/pencils to sophisticated data visualization software like Tableau. MS Excel also has some pretty sophisticated charts that you can create from your data. And there are also lots of free online tools that you can use too — it’s admittedly been a year or more since I really surveyed the set of free tools available, but I’d probably still recommend Infogram if you want a free web-based infographic maker and aren’t sure where to start.

For help deciding what type of chart or graph might be most effective in visualizing your data, consult the Data Viz Catalogue (it might be most helpful for you to switch to the “sort by functions” view at the top of the page).

Digital Images

Hand-drawn charts and graphs are perfectly 100% acceptable, if that’s what you prefer. However, please do not spend lots of time carefully crafting hand-drawn charts and then snap a crappy picture of them on your cell phone to post to the web. There are lots of scanners available on campus that you can use to scan your chart into a high-quality JPG image — I’d suggest that you take a quick trip to the Media Lab on the 4th floor of the library and scan your drawings. That space is underutilized and an excellent resource that you should know about.

If you create your visualizations with an online tool, just make sure that you can export them as a JPG image, or that you can at least take a good screenshot of your work.

Publish

Publish your charts as a sketch post to your site. Identify what conceptual issue you were tracking or what question you wanted to answer (or begin to answer). Include 2 or 3 paragraphs explaining what conclusions you have drawn from the data that you collected. Were you able to answer the question you had posed for yourself? What sorts of judgement calls did you face while gathering the data? Why did you choose to visualize your data in the manner that you did? What do these visualizations say about your own life? If you were to continue this project into the future, would you go about it in pretty much the way you have done this week or would you do things differently now that you have looked at the data to this point? Have you found this to be a valuable tool for self analysis?

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