Link to Final Project:
Final Visualization
The last Fall Semester was my first semester for my graduate program at Northeastern University. One of the classes that I took was Programming Foundation for Digital Media, this was a core class of the program.
For the final project, I needed to do a visualization of data. Three was the minimum required, with at least two of these data to be objective, and one of the data to be subjective. With that in mind, I’ve proceeded to collect data across 30 days, with five variables of data each day. These data were collected every day in a spreadsheet for the best accuracy and in order for there to be a relationship with each other and a successful visualization.
About Data:
For 30 days, I was able to collect the data for the following variables:
- Phone Screentime:
- Type of Data: Objective.
- From: iPhone Screentime function.
- Unit: Hours.
- Social Media Screentime:
- Type of Data: Objective.
- From: iPhone Screentime function.
- Unit: Hours.
- Homework Time
- Type of Data: Objective.
- From: Self-Reported, based on real time spent doing homework.
- Unit: Hours.
- Video Games Time
- Type of Data: Objective.
- From: iPhone Screentime function.
- Unit: Hours.
- Energy Level
- Type of Data: Subjective
- From: Self-Evaluated
- Unit: 1-5
I kept the objective data that was collected very simple and easy to understand. The unit is hours and it’s all collected from the iPhone Screentime function. However, with the subjective data, it evaluates my energy level with a unit of 1-5. This was based on how I feel at the end of the day. When I have low energy, it will be recorded as 1 or lower than 3. This is when I feel exhausted or I might have felt like I didn't accomplish much during the day. When it's 3 or higher, that usually means I feel pretty good and accomplished. The data collected can be found here in JSON format.
Draft Visualizations
In order for me to come up with the final visualizations with the different variables that I’ve collected, I’ve actually tried a couple of different ideas and was married to those ideas for a while. Here are some of the visualizations that I was sure I was going to use for the final version throughout the time that I was working on the project:
This was one of the first visualization I sketched. The reason why I liked this graph is because of the variation of shapes and sizes that there is. However, in practice, I thought that this was too clustered, and there were too many shapes to portray not-that-many information. On top of that, sometimes, when the shapes are on top of each other, it can be hard to see what the data is actually saying.
With this visualization, I tried to explore the correlation between my Phone Screentime and my Social Media Screentime. As you could see, from my old thesis, I stated that the more time I spent on social media, the more time I spent on my phone. But from this visualization, that’s clearly not the case. Therefore, I did not end up with this visualization and stopped developing it any further. Luckily, this was in the earlier steps of the process.
Up until the final presentation, I was married to this visualization and thought that this was going to my final submission. The hypothesis I have for this was that the more time I spend doing homework, the higher my energy level. However, just by looking at the visualization, there really isn’t much dynamic to it, even though there was a clear correlation between my homework hours and my energy level while also proving my hypothesis to be correct. On top of that, the color that I chose to go with the graph made the data that are on top of each other much harder to see. Therefore, after the final presentation, I’ve decided to with a different approach, and my final visualization.
Final Visualization
For my final visualization, I decided that I was going to change my y-axis and r-scale around for a more interesting and dynamic graph, while maintaining my hypothesis and still having it being proven correctly. Therefore, in my final visualization, the x-axis is “Homework Time” in hours, the y-axis is “Phone Screentime” in hours, the size of the circle being the energy level, and the color yellow, represents not playing video games, and red as played video games. The reason why I chose red and yellow is because I think it makes the circles pop up against each other if they were to be on top of one another. Additionally, I also changed the opacity of the circle to 0.5 in order for all the circles to be visible.
Rationale
As I’ve seen in class with the presentations, there were a lot of different visualizations and they were all very interesting. However, I personally don’t think that it would fits my data very well in order to tell a story. I went to https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery a lot for this. I’ve explored a lot of different graphs visually without incorporating my data.On one hand, I think that the visualizations that are available on the website were very fun to look at. On the other hand, for some of these graphs, I really did not understand the story that it was telling. Therefore, I decided that I wasn’t going to make my graph something complicated. Rather, I wanted to make something visible and was going to convey the story about my hypothesis.
On top of the visualization online, one of the biggest inspirations for me were the practices we were doing in class. Since we just studied it and had to put it into practice immediately, it naturally becomes a big inspiration for me. Additionally, from one of the websites that was provided, https://www.datavis.ca/gallery/bright-ideas.php this website was a big inspiration for me. The reason why is because it shows graphs that work and graphs that didn’t work, highlighting the importance of understanding the given data.
Self-Analysis
For the duration of the project, there was two main hypothesis that I’ve discovered and one of them made it to my final visualization. The first hypothesis is “the more time I spend on social media, the more time I spend on my phone.” From my perspective at the time, I thought that this was a very simple causation type of hypothesis and can be proven with all of my objective data. However, that was exactly the reason why I abandoned it. The hypothesis was a little too empty and it only uses two of the five variables that I’ve collected. Additionally, when I did the visualization for this hypothesis, they ended up having no correlation from each other. Therefore, I stopped working with this hypothesis and decided to work with my final hypothesis.
The second hypothesis that I came up with is “The more time I spend doing homework, the higher my energy level.” This hypothesis was actually a typo mistake. For one of the lab’s assignment, we have to submit a new visualization with a new hypothesis. So the hypothesis I was originally going for was “The more time I spend doing homework, the lower my energy level.” After putting the visualization together, seeing the correlation with the typo hypothesis that I’ve made, I decided just to go with it and that was how I came to my final hypothesis.
One might be surprised to see that the more time spent on doing homework, the higher the energy level, so was I. This hypothesis and conclusion has taught me something new about myself. From the fact that I can finish my assignment, I think that there’s a surge of energy for the feeling of accomplishment or achievement of being done with the homework that makes me a lot happier. I have never collected these data before the project so seeing that that’s the case, I’m pleasantly surprise and I think I might continue with collecting the data and see if there’s anything else I can learn about myself.
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