<story><title>Banning exploration in my infovis class</title><url>https://medium.com/@eytanadar/banning-exploration-in-my-infovis-class-9578676a4705</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>soyiuz</author><text>Whoa, I cannot disagree more with the premise and the conclusions of the author.&lt;p&gt;Exploration is absolutely one of the key goals of data visualization. Tukey&amp;#x27;s insight was two-fold: First, that statistics puts too much emphasis on confirmation but not enough on systematic exploration of a data set. Too often researchers do not understand their data. They bring their own biases and preconceived notions, where they should be listening to the data.&lt;p&gt;Second, too often is visualization mistaken for confirmation. A curious pattern or an outlier may just be an artifact of the layout algorithm. The &amp;quot;find&amp;quot; part of visualization should happen through mathematical insight. Graphics can at best describe the underlying mathematical reality but no more. One cannot strictly speaking &amp;quot;find&amp;quot; anything, only form intuitions or illustrate already proven insights.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the author&amp;#x27;s difficulty in evaluating his students work lies not in the exploration part of their assignments, but in his own pedagogic emphasis on &amp;quot;tools,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;frameworks,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;users.&amp;quot; None of those things are relevant to data visualization as such. They might be goals for a business built around data visualization (to produce tools, or to identify user needs). A university should offer more than job training. Those interested in users and in &amp;quot;what one gets paid for&amp;quot; would do better in an internship or at a more narrowly technical trade school.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know how &amp;quot;finding&amp;quot; is any more of a goal for data visualization than &amp;quot;exploring.&amp;quot; Data visualizations tell stories. They often support the first and the last step in data analysis: the exploratory phase and the presentation of findings. They are inherently subjective, evocative, concise, artful.</text></comment>
<story><title>Banning exploration in my infovis class</title><url>https://medium.com/@eytanadar/banning-exploration-in-my-infovis-class-9578676a4705</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonsarris</author><text>Great article and applicable to way more than just infovis.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In denying the student the ability to frame their main task as exploration, they are forced to concede that what they want to find is not what their end-user may be looking for and then: (a) engage with their client or “create” a reasonable one with real tasks and decisions, (b) understand the data and tasks much more deeply, and (c) identify good validation strategies (no more insights!).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Maybe this is obvious, but when I started teaching I thought that being more open-ended about what I allowed was better. That somehow it would lead to more diverse, cool, weird, and novel projects. In some ways that’s true, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, teaching infovis is itself a wicked design problem.&lt;p&gt;Its not just infovis, I think this is a good teaching idea in a very broad sense. Reading other people&amp;#x27;s writing nowadays, people are apt to be very lazy with their language and this by consequence makes them lazy with their ideas. Infovis should ban &amp;quot;exploration.&amp;quot; Architecture should ban &amp;quot;modern.&amp;quot; Career centers doing resume reviews should definitely ban &amp;quot;utilize.&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;m sure every field has such tropes that are maybe useful in the real world sometimes, but make for quite lazy school projects.&lt;p&gt;In fact I think he may be going a little overkill in justifying his ban on &amp;quot;exploration&amp;quot;. He doesn&amp;#x27;t need to talk about weighing the pro&amp;#x2F;con here, if before he had a paucity and now he has a multiplicity of interesting student results, he&amp;#x27;s won and they&amp;#x27;ve won. &amp;quot;Surprise&amp;quot; be damned. The kids can buy lotto tickets if they want to be surprised by big data.&lt;p&gt;For being so simple, restricting the common and obvious in classrooms is probably an underrated technique. This is widely done in photography classes, disallowing students from doing certain things, like making them only use film for a while, so they really have to frame photos and can&amp;#x27;t just snap 1000 and &amp;quot;discover&amp;quot; one good one, or restrict to annoyingly wide prime lenses on an assignment to take some good portraits, etc. These constraints, even though they are constraints, greatly reduce the samey-ness of results and make the students engage their brains.</text></comment>