Weekly Spring 04 — Sculpture Concepts
This week I continued to collect responses for my Qualtrics survey. Aside from sending out to the class pages on Facebook, I reached out to the organizers of Sustained Dialogue on our campus. Sustained Dialogue meetings allow students to meet in groups and discuss topics such as diversity, race and culture, politics, and social class in a safe space. These conversations are relevant to my project and relate to the opinions and statements that I aim to collect with my survey. Although I was unable to attend this week’s meeting due to my schedule, Student Affairs was able to forward my survey to the Sustained Dialogue participants. I believe these student responses in particular are good sources of feedback.
Currently, I have gathered 170 responses. In the coming days, I will monitor if more are being submitted, but will work with what I have so far. On Qualtrics I created a Default Report of all the responses, then some filtered reports by race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. All these reports can be found here.
While reviewing these results, I was surprised by how many participants wrote statements about their experiences. Some were more in depth and personal than others, but overall it was interesting and eye opening to hear different students’ viewpoints. All these statements were then compiled into a google doc. I hope to use a projector to display these text statements on a wall (or possibly on the data sculpture itself) or around my physical data visualization.
Moreover, I thought more about a graduation theme for the data sculpture. Rather than just creating tassels as I had previously brainstormed, I decided to develop a concept of creating graduation caps. Responses to the survey questions will determine aspects of the graduation cap’s appearance. Some elements I thought of were:
Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Sexual Orientation = Color of the base of the cap, and tassel string (Each measure will be assigned a color)
Frequency of coming in contact with the following persons (White, African American, heterosexual man, openly gay/lesbian/bisexual etc.) =Length of the tassel string
Size of the overall graduation cap = Represent the number of students from each group that participated in the survey (Ex. the largest cap represent White/Caucasian students)
Sense of belonging and acceptance on campus = Position of the tassel (A scale of 0–10 corresponds to left-right
Reasons for feeling like a minority = Color/Pattern of the mortar board
Along with having 4–5 graduation cap sculptures, I would also like to display a graph of the quantitative data from Center of Institutional effectiveness. The idea of creating physical data visualizations using string came up in our last class discussion. I have seen examples of this such as Data Strings: Physical Parallel Coordinates , and I would like to use this method to create physical line graphs about enrollment over the years:
(Data from CIE put into Excel)
I will be working with the data I have collected for thesis for my Data Visualization mini course final project as well. Hopefully I will create some 2D web visualizations that will be useful and help me envision the overall physical display.
