Last week, the reading “What is Data” covered the vast topic of data. This reading touched on the definition of data, different forms of data, and how data relates to writing. To me, the most interesting part in “What is Data?” was the discussion of how data relates to writing and how data becomes writing. This section of the reading made me think more about how digital writing and data has become so prevalent our daily lives. The hands-on activity focused on data visualization, or in other words, charts and graphs. There were three examples to be analyzed and discussed. Both the reading and the hands-on activity were discussed in each blog post this week.

For a brief summary of the hands-on activity blog posts for the week, the discussion was over the three data examples. Overall, each student applied their new knowledge from their weekly reading to each data set. Most students mentioned that the structure of the data in the Card Picker example could be confusing, especially if there were more members and data in the set. The popular opinion for the second data visualization example, The Demographics of Others, was that the data was visually appealing and well displayed, but that the lack of numerical data detracts from the effectiveness of this data display. For the third and last visualization example, a few blog posts mentioned the ease with which the user is able to read the data by recognizing the timeline of the movie. On the other hand, one blog post called this data display overwhelming and difficult to read.

The summary of topics for the reflective blog posts are movies (specifically, Netflix), the perfect sandwich, the environment, and COVID-19. Camryn and I both discussed COVID-19 data in our reflective blog posts. Camryn’s post references a tweet where a student used the Brazos County Health Department data to create a more effective display than the Texas A&M’s data visualization.

Two blog’s used data related to the environment, one for FEMA and one for flooding. With the recent hurricane making land in Louisiana and the four year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey, these data examples stood out to me.

The example that used Netflix’s data to apply the new knowledge from the weekly reading was an effective blog post. The positive and negatives of this display of data was thoroughly discussed. A close example to the Netflix data is a bubble chart that displays major films from 2008 to 2016. The movie data examples are popular this week! The two data examples that fall into the “other” category are the source that shows the benefits of using an interactive dashboard and the source that uses data to make the perfect banana and peanut butter sandwich. The data visualization example that shows the benefits of using an interactive dashboard was interesting to me because of the application of the dashboard! After watching the linked video, I recognize this type of data visualization! The perfect banana and peanut butter sandwich example took an unorthodox approach to viewing data, which actually added to my understanding of how important writing is in data.

The larger issues I found across this week’s reflective blog posts was the way in which data is displayed. There are positives and negatives to each way to display data, but only one way can be chosen. Because of this, many factors need to be considered such as time to create the display, space on the display, the level of difficulty to read the data, and the purpose of displaying the data. In the blog post discussing how flooding affects the community, data is shown that predicts the likelihood that a home in a certain area will flood. This is a great example that emphasizes the purpose of this data.

Additionally, there was a brief discussion in a few blog posts about a new view on data. One blog mentioned that the technical side of data was thought to be more mathematical, but in reality it is also heavily writing influenced. On the other end of the spectrum, one blog mentioned that coding is new and frustrating. In this post, the student even said “In my mind, I compartmentalize coding with mathematics and science: fact based and structured. However, there are facets to code that also include language and orality.” I have always heard that learning to code is like learning a new language, but I have not thought about the extent to which language comes into play in technology. Reading each blog post from this last week has helped me understand the importance the English language plays in both data and coding!