This week's activity required us to keep track of one habit or action for the course of four days. The activity that I decided to track was the number of times I was asked to do a task. It was both an easy yet hard assignment? Easy in the sense where I knew what I wanted to track and hard because I completely forgot to keep track during the final day of the assignment.
As you can see above, I tried to be really thorough with the time when I was asked to do something as I initially wanted to incorporate the time feature. But that idea fell apart during the third day when I started to keep forgetting to jot down some tasks. And this forgetfulness is in full effect on the fourth day.
From this data that I've collected, I noticed that most of them are mundane house chores with a lot of food-related tasks. I'm pretty sure I missed a couple of coffee and milk requests because I remember having to do that more than the number of times I noted down. But anyway, moving on, I split the chores into four categories which were:
Making drinks and water-related chores
Cooking
General house chores
Passing/Grabbing something
Despite the similarities in the types of tasks that I did, I had quite a hard time fully categorizing them into a more specific scale. I feel like dividing them into four types was the best choice as I didn't want to fully overwhelm the final visualisation.
Execution wise, I decided to go with a dot plot data chart. I chose the dot plot because I think it suits the categorization system that I've decided to go with and it has a lot of space for me to draw out the symbols and legends.
As you can see below, my chart is not exactly the most convenient nor easiest to read once I've fully drawn it out. But! I decided to go through with it because if I merely put a small dot to represent the number of times I did a cooking-related chore, I feel like it'll be very bland as the reader can't explicitly tell what I was cooking throughout the duration of four days. In terms of reading the chart, the y-axis represents the type of request/tasks that I've done. Whereas the x-axis represents the frequency of doing said tasks.
Below is the legend for each drawing that I've done to represent my data. I realise that its a lot of drawing and I guess kinda cluttered in a way? But I kind of like the outcome because it really forced me to be more specific in categorizing something and the small doodles are very enjoyable to draw!
Overall, visualising data is an enjoyable yet tedious activity to do. Compiling the data was by far the most exciting thing to do because that's the moment that you keep track of all the minor things that you usually won't bother to notice on a normal basis. Whereas the visualising part was the hardest. Its because I'm not so proficient in translating existing data into something that's easily digestible to the viewers as I find myself wanting to include everything into it- which can be seen in the dot chart I created.
Bottom line, data visualisation requires you to understand how to communicate through visuals better while having a limited amount of words.
Hey Amira, very well reflected. I like how you explained the issues you faced throughout the activity, the fact that you forgot to track, and how challenging it was for you to visualise your data. Try and look at more references such as the book "Dear Data" as well as the resources I shared on blackboard. The more you "consume" and then put into practice, the more you'll improve at it.