Reflections

Reflections are due before the first class of each week. We cover them in class

The goal of Reflections is to allow you to engage with the outer visualization community, guided by your own interests.

Every course you take is a sampling of a diverse community of research, practitioners, and professionals. Engaging with the visualization community, even as an observer, will significantly enhance your learning in this course by allowing you to forge connections to the things we learn with the outside world.

Here's how it works:

1. Every week, make an effort to explore the data visualization community (see Finding Connections below).
2. Before class, add a reflection on a writing of your choosing to the appropriate week in your fork of the repo (see Writing Reflections).
3. To submit, make a pull request.
4. Come to class prepared to talk about what you've found this week with others.

Finding Connections

Everyone has their preferred way of finding out more about a topic. You probably already come across visualizations in your daily life, either through news or social media. If you already feel "plugged in" to the data-driven world, by all means use those as reflection material.

I imagine many of you will want to "plug in" more to the visualization ecosystem, however. Here are several ways you might do this:

• Following folks on Social Media (for some reason there are tons of datavis folks on BlueSky and Mastodon, X seems to be quieter these days)
• Reading visualization news blogs like FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot
• Diving into a domain of interest (biology, security, etc) and it's relation to visualization (see VisXAI, BioVis, VizSec for example)
• Wikipedia
• Reddit (/r/dataisbeautiful) <- DONT JUST RELY ON THIS ONE! Sampling Bias...
• Stack Overflow (check the d3 and ggplot2 tags)
• Academic / practitioner visualization blogs: eagereyes.org (he links to many others)

...and hundreds of other ways.

Writing Reflections

There are few requirements for the reflection. I ask that you aim for 10 sentences at minimum as a service to yourself and to others that take time to read what you've written. Any less and the effectiveness of the reflection for learning may be lost.

The form and overall length of the writing is up to you. This task is meant to give you the creative space for exploration in the the data viz world. Some suggestions about the kinds of refelctions we expect are agreements or disagreements with a paper or talk you find, a small introduction to a new visualization technique/technology that came out, improvements or future work for a visualization you find on a news website etc. I recommend including links so you can find the resources later on. You can make multiple entries if it suites you-- I could imagine calling on reflections as you generate ideas for your final project.

Tips about Submissions (Pull Request)

1. Fork the cs4804-24c/reflections repo to your own GitHub repositories page. ('Fork' button is on the right-top corner between 'Watch' and 'Star')
2. Click the small triangle to see your existing forks, if you already have a copy, click to direct to your own page.
3. Update the weekly reflections or the assignment content in your own repository, once you have some changes (different from the original repo), you can start to pull requests.
4. On your own repo page, under the icon of GitHub and your username, beside the '<> Code' tag, click the 'Pull requests' tag, and click the 'New pull request' button to create a pull request. (the prominent green button)
5. If you have some changes to the repo, in the next page you will see the differences are listed on the page, click the 'Create pull request' button at the top-right corner. (also a green button)
6. Then you can add your update message like "submission for week 1"/"submission for a1" in the 'Add a title' and more details in the 'Add a description' area, then click 'Create pull request' to finish.
7. Now you can find your pull requests in cs4804-24c/reflections page, just under the tag 'Pull requests'.
8. If you want to update the week 2 for example, after you make changes in your own repository, repeat step 4, but this time, in the next page, you will see a green button 'View pull request', click it and you will see your existing pull request, and you can leave a comment as an update, like 'Update week 2', then the 'Comment' button, also in green.

P.S. Pull requests can only be made or updated only when you have some changes in your own copied repo which make it different with the original repo or the last request. So please try after you change the content, if you want to give it a try, you can test first, after you finish the reflection or assignment, leave an update in the pull request.