Background:
The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with some experience evaluating the use of mark embellishments within visualizations.
Tasks:
Below is a link to a recently published academic paper that describes a series of experiments on mark embellishments. Read the paper and write a report explaining the underlying research question, the approach taken by the authors, and your personal response to the results of the experiment. Your goal here is to perform an abstract analysis of a research effort using the approaches described in the textbook.
Your report should consist of three sections on 1-2 pages.
First, describe the underlying research question(s) in your own words. Why perform this research? What’s the impact for the potential outcomes? What principles in the textbook that relate to the research questions? (5 points)
Second, describe the approach taken by the authors to find answers. How was the paper organized to assist their approach? (20 points)
Third, discuss your personal response to the results obtained by the authors. Are you convinced by what they found? Do you have any objections to their findings, and if so, why? Are there any counterexamples of visualizations that you believe refute their claims? (5 points)
Grading: We will evaluate the quality of your analysis of the paper within each section. We will evaluate if you followed the directions and estimate the quality of your conclusions. We will evaluate how well you justify your conclusions based upon the material introduced in the textbook.
Please proofread your submission before submitting it and make sure it is free of spelling and grammar issues. (10% of the grade.)
Paper
Drew Skau, Lane Harrison, Robert Kosara, An Evaluation of the Impact of Visual Embellishments in Bar Charts, Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings EuroVis), vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 221–230, 2015. [pdf (Links to an external site.)]
