Blog Post 4: Visualization

 

How did you select the images and digital platform for your project?  

First, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to portray and how I wanted to portray it. I knew the disproportionate statistics of incarceration were something striking, but I was trying to think of how to make the project about the cost of crime since that was my focus. I knew an infographic or video would be my method (video largely just due to my experience), but decided on an infographic since I don’t think moving image work is best for analytic display but more emotional display. I settled on an infographic as a way of portraying bold numbers and cutting statistics. 

I thought an interesting idea would be to contrast the dollar cost of crime to the social cost of crime. I wanted the main form of visual imagery to be numbers and human bodies, or at least renditions of humans. In the infographic, you’ll notice the dominance of the human form with a series of numerical values depicting the realities of incarceration as a way of forcing a reminder that these numbers are describing people.

I chose a simple color palette to reinforce the boldness of an infographic. The black text is the filler/elaboration/clarification/completion, but the red is the power. There is a severity to these two colors that matches the severity of the toll of crime and incarceration.

In what ways did creating the visualization deepen your understanding of the topic in ways that reading alone might not have?

As stated before, I think this project allowed me to connect the ideas of my topic to a psychological power that reading alone does not hold. Colors, human body shapes, boldness and different composition allow an accentuation and sensationalizing that a paragraph of text can not. 

I got to experience a different way of thinking about facts. What should be focused on? What visual tools would reinforce these concepts? How can I guide a reader? What structure should it take? I moved through these questions in my journey, so had to further my understanding of what mattered.

How has the process influenced your thinking on visualization as a vehicle for learning and/or how might you use visualization in your future teaching?

To be honest, I am not fully pleased with how this turned out. It looks amateurish. It took a lot longer than expected. It is not ideal.

I think the concepts contained in this project, my project and visualization are wonderful for expanding the ways we teach and share with our students, but I don’t think this will be a sustainable practice for me as a teacher. For most of the topics we will be covering in the social studies, something about any topic will exist and be much better than what I can produce in a timely manner.

I did find value in being able to depict exactly what I wanted to create based on my prior research, but this is not something I will likely pursue further. I have downloaded about 30 sample infographics that I used for guidance that I plan to use in classes in the future.

Where I do see using this is in turning it into an assignment. Having the students produce an alternate form of a research paper via visual medium sounds fantastic. It lets them follow the process we followed for this project, and their work would serve as wonderful hallway/classroom displays.