ASSIGNMENT - ALL ABOUT MMIS 646

ACTIVITIES -

• Use SAP analytics tools to analyze dataabout all of you.
• Make a analytic report to tell a story of your analysis with information visualizations
• Evaluate other students' reports

DATA REQUIRED -

671_Assignment3lums data files are available in the folder Assignment.

TASKS FOR ASSIGNMENT -

You will uncover the infinite possibilities hidden within data to helpme (Dr. Hur) to design/changeMMIS 646. The audience of your story is me. I am a knowledgeable visualization person working at NSU as a higher educator. You can give me new information about you or your needs as a group, or make suggestions based on your analysis (including statistics or data mining). I want your data story toget insights about how to make a lasting and positive impact on what really matters. What will your story be?

This time, please use visual encoding properties to highlight your message. This time, we will not have a presentation, so your report with info. visualization should be self-explainable. Please put more efforts on visual aspect.

The assignment asks you to perform the following four parts:

1. CHOOSE DATASETS

1. Start either by focusing data variables you are interested in for analysis or choosing visualization techniques (charts or interactions) you will build. Think about why the data types and the techniques are a good match for one another.

2. There is a SAP PA lumsfile named "671_Assignment 3." It is created based on the information you wrote to introduce yourselves in Discussion board on the first day of this course. Also you see other data, such as password and scores of your performance (those are fake, meaning I mixed the student ID and all the performance scores), in the dataset. You should work with this "671_Assignment3" dataset. You are free to combine other datasets that are interesting to you. Just make sure to document where you get your data in your writeup.

3. Briefly scan the files and familiarize yourself with the data.

4. Generate a few hypotheses to be considered, tasks to be performed, or questions to be asked about the data. Think about all the different kinds of analysis tasks that a person might want to perform in working with data sets. For instance, someone working with a data set about class might have tasks like

a. Do online students/offline students show different needs?

b. How experience in InfoVis is related to the score?

c. Does the characteristics of the students vary a lot?

d. What (OS, vis experience, work, hobby etc.) makes students prefer to conduct, critique papers or class activities?

2. ANALYZE THE DATASETS IN SAP PA

1. Load the file into SAP PA. You can include several InfoVis in your story of data analytics. We have seen many interactive visualization techniques in class and in the readings.

2. Use SAP PA to explore the dataset(s) and see if you can discover interesting or unexpected findings in the dataset. Keep in mind, the task here is to uncover hidden trends and knowledge that might be interesting to Dr. Hur.  Put yourself in the shoes of a data analyst and consider questions that such a person would confront.

3. Consider your hypotheses, tasks, and questions, and try to answer those questions. This moment, you may have new hypotheses or questions from unexpected findings. The most important thing is that you should decide 1 question (message/topic)in your story. You may need to incorporate the main idea in the title of your report.

4. You may use Ave (not Sum) for Measures for this analysis. You may consider to create derived measure as well. 

5. Filtering is somehow important for further analysis. If filtered, do not forget to mention the subset of your data to be analyzed in the write-up!

3. VISUALIZE THE STORY

1. The report should be self-explained (with texts). Try to limit a small number (2 or 3) of information visualizations to support your story. Sometimes text is the most powerful to deliver messages. My tip is to put efforts on filtering and highlighting on the visualizations rather than creating many visualizations.

2. For this assignment, you should pay attention on the visualizations you created. Please consider the design principles we discussed in class like,

• Include all components of reports such as Title, Table, Chart, Table, Label, Frames, Annotations
• Choose charts or tables depending on purpose.
• Consider data type that matches to particularInfoVis, expecially,treemap, network diagram, parallel coordinates, word clouds we have seen.
• Do not use many different colors ( > 10); if it has, you may consider to filter
• Use pre-attentive features (color, form, movement) to emphasize messages
• Layout/ Frames to group relevant contents
• Consider Tufte's design principles (i.e., Data integrity / Maximize data-ink ratio / Maximize data density)

3. If SAP PA does not support your idea on visualization (like dust&Magnet, or other interaction features), please mention it in writeup report.

4. WRITE A REPORT ON YOUR FINDINGS

1. Produce a Story with data analysis results. Your final submission should include:

• Story. The insights you gained from the analysis and InfoVis. You may express it in report title or using annotation text, with supporting InfoVis. If you have a question, it is good idea to start the question as report title.
• A brief description of datasets, if you have used your own datasets in your story.
• A brief description of your final InfoVis. Be sure to explain how the infovis helped to facilitate the finding, and why the interaction techniques (if you want to use) are effective in the context of your data and purpose.

2. Save as a PDF file for the report you created.