CSC_51052 (formerly INF552) - Individual/Group Projects

Students are evaluated based on the results of individual projects, and to a lesser extent on their achievements during lab sessions (petites classes).

1. Project Milestones

Based on the individual/group project, I evaluate the theoretical knowledge and visualization design skills that you will have acquired during the course. Projects start early during P1 (right after the first session), with the following milestones:

2. Choosing Dataset(s)

Milestone 1 comes early (mid october) to ensure that the dataset or collections datasets you choose for your project feature sufficient richness to enable you to create meaningful visualizations. One important thing to consider is that the number and variety of dimensions matters more than the number of rows/items in the dataset. The data having a variety of attributes -- mixing nominal, ordered, quantitative, geospatial, temporal data -- will provide more opportunities to design interesting visualizations than, say, a table with millions of rows but only three or four homogeneous quantitative data columns. Those can be challenging to visualize as well, but you will likely have less opportunities to demonstrate the skills you have acquired during this course. Datasets structured as graphs or trees can also yield good opportunities. Datasets featuring uncertainty in the data as well (we cover the visualization of uncertainty in Session 4).

3. Expectations and Evaluation Criteria

The individual/group project is really about the design of visualizations. You may write code to create it (D3, Vega-Lite, ggplot2, matplotlib, anything else), or use dedicated software such as Tableau, or even draw it on paper. There are no restrictions about how you create the visualizations.

You can work alone, in pairs, possibly larger groups, up to three students. I will obviously have higher expectations from projects depending on how many students are involved.

The following criteria are considered when evaluating your project:

A given project is not necessarily expected to rank high on all these criteria. Some projects will put more emphasis on the design aspect and insights gained by visualizing the data, others will rather be focusing on the technical realization. When using software such as Tableau, which make a lot of design decisions for you, it is still important to rationalize the design choices made, grounded in what we have seen during the course (in other words, explain why Tableau made those choices in terms of chart type and visual mapping strategy). Obviously, when using such software, my expectations are higher in terms of the number and elaboratness of the overall project given that no or close-to-zero time will have been spent on software development.

Sample individual projects from last year are available: 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6.

3. Report Submission

The report is expected to be approximately 4-5 pages long (text). Illustrations are not considered in this page count, since page length will vary depending on how many illustrations you include. Elements expected in the report:

Upload your assignment on Moodle by 2024-12-20.

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