Reflection

This project was really fun for me because I got to use real data that is actually relevant to my life. I thought it was interesting how easy it was to make it look like the sophomores absolutely dominate the other classes in terms of contribution. It made me realize how easily a viewer could be misled. I think it’s more natural to question whether the class sizes are the same when looking at my bubble plots, but when considering one of the two maps referenced above, I can see how it would be easy to wrongfully assume that the population is uniform. This project helped me learn, then, that when viewing a graph or plot or any visual representation of data, it is important to question what factors are being accounted for and which are being ignored.

My inner critic is partially satisfied with this work. I think it’s very functional – it does distort the data and could definitely convince a viewer that the sophomores contribute much more to the team. However, it’s not a particularly beautiful data representation and if I could do it again, I would try to make something more aesthetically pleasing. It would also be interesting to explore the possibility of making it interactive in some way, since the current visualization is rather static and boring.