Infographic

Overview

Advances in technology have made collecting, generating, and organizing data much easier to do than in the past. Our sophistication in analysis and interpretation has also changed. Sorting, arranging, and sharing data has been facilitated by new forms and tools of data visualization. That’s why understanding both the affordances and the techniques of creating an infographic are good rhetorical skills to have.

But there’s another layer here. For the next couple of weeks, you are going to do some analysis of your own writing and writing process. One way to do an analysis is to treat your written work as “big data.” How many words have you written since you have been at DU? What genres of assignments have you done? What are your most common words? What percentage of your words are adverbs? What grade-level do you write at? Collecting this data is one thing, but presenting it in a visual way is a type of curation.

Your task

After you have completed the Curation assignment, think about the writing you have done as one giant mass of data. Your next steps are going to require that you be creative in sharing quantitative data about your writing. There are a lot of options here, and you can do as much or as little as you want, and certainly be as creative as you want, as long as it satisfies the assignment goals [see the end of this page].

For this activity, you will be using Expresso. Expresso is an app that presents quantitative information about your writing such as your average sentence length, the reading level, and your most common words. You just copy and paste from any work into the box, and Expresso does its magic.

  1. Decide how you want to sort your writing for analysis. Do you want to analyze by genre? Or maybe by purpose/task? Maybe you want to analyze it by your own categories? Maybe all three? If you wanted to sort by genre, then create a new document, and copy and paste all of the genre documents into one file. Don’t worry about formatting. Once that is done, copy and paste this massive text file into Expresso. Copy and paste the result column into a new document so you have a record. Do this for the other sorting genres as well if you are interested (see Assignment Goals)
  2. What are the elements that are not reflected in Expresso’s data? For example, how many pictures do you use per assignment? How many sources do you use on average in a research assignment? How lond did you spend writing a piece? If you use Microsoft Word, go to the File then Properties menu to see your editing time on a document (this is based on the file name, so if you renamed a file, it can sometimes give a wrong number). If you use Google Docs and the Chrome browser, download Draftback which shows your document activity (it plays back your writing process) and presents some statistics. Sort and arrange that data as well. Don’t be limited by the options here. Think of others.
  3. Begin a rough sketch of your infographic using pencil and paper. What information do you want to feature and where? Do not forget everything you learned about design—think of contrast and shape, unity and type.
  4. Once you have your sketch, explore one of the following tools (The video tutorials will give you a sense of what is possible. Just pick the tool that will best allow you to make your infographic):
  1. Once your infographic is done, post it to the blog as an image in PNG or JPG format (or link) [due Friday, 11:59pm]

Assignment Goals

The primary goal here is to tell a quantitative story using visuals that draws from the words you have written as data. I will be looking that you did the following.

  1. Do you have at least 5 information parts or bits. A bit is any aggregate or central tendency from your writing. An aggregate bit would be total pages or words you have written since you arrived at DU. A central tendency bit would be average sentence length of your research-based essays.
  2. Do you observe general design principles as outlined by Sue Jenkins?
  3. Do you have at least one “above-and-beyond” part? If I tell you an example, then it is not above-and-beyond. Think about the Infographic information sheet, and consider examples you are familiar with. I’m telling you to surprise me here. More importantly, i’m telling you to do something cool for your audience.