"Pi Day" Event Unites Faculty, Staff, and Students

DataViz Accepting Guest Submissions

Would you like to contribute to an upcoming edition of DataViz News? We would love to hear from you! 

We are especially interested in data visualization "tips and tricks" and articles that focus process and reflection--what worked well and opportunities for improvement. Our recommended length is 250-500 words and if your featured project is publicly viewable, feel free to include a link to it.

To be included in our May edition, please send a draft to Kirsten Pagan <krowe@binghamton.edu> no later than 12 noon, Monday, April 22nd. 

Without further ado, read on to hear from our first guest contributor--Xinyuan Qiu.

Mapping the “Plague” by Tableau

by Xinyuan Qiu, PhD Candidate, English 

One tool that I have been experimenting with in my research and teaching is Tableau. I find it very effective and useful for visualizing the historical  locations mentioned in literary texts. In an undergraduate-level literature class, “Pandemic in Literature,” I introduced Tableau to map the “plague.” Throughout the semester, we read literary delineations of the “plague” that are set in a wide range of geographical locations and different time periods. In the last class, to give a clear overview of what we have covered, I taught students how to use Tableau to create a map to display all the plague-stricken places depicted in the course texts.

I provided the class with a data set in an Excel spreadsheet that includes names of the plague-stricken cities, countries, the texts in which they are mentioned, and the latitudes and longitudes of the locations. I also taught them how to highlight important information by using different marks. For instance, we used “Color” to highlight different locations. We used “Label” to display the texts in which these locations appear. Some students also used “Size” to demonstrate the years in which the texts were created. The larger the dots are, the closer these texts are to our time. Other students experimented with “Tooltip” to show additional information that they found significant. My class enjoyed working with Tableau very much. Creating such a map gave them a view of the plague in a global context and led them to consider how representations of the pandemic vary with locations, regions, and time periods.

With the aid of Tableau, my class was also able to draw itineraries. We watched a French movie, The Horseman on the Roof, which tells a story of two young people traveling across France while the cholera epidemic was ravaging. By Tableau my class visualized the route taken by the two characters as well as the epidemic-stricken locations. Since the film is mainly about the epidemic and traveling, the map wonderfully displays the gist of the story. From teaching this session, I found Tableau a powerful tool for storytelling and demonstrating the key information of a complex text.

There's still time to fill your toolbox!

Be sure to take advantage of this month's opportunities with our colleagues in Libraries - Digital Scholarship and Dear Data Binghamton. 

• Coding Visualizations with ggplot2 in R (Tue, Apr 9th), part of the Spring 2024 workshop series--Data Visualization: Fill Your Toolbox [register via B-Engaged]
• Draw-in event (Tue, Apr 16th), hosted by Dear Data Binghamton [register via B-Engaged]