Project Pitches / Science Fair

Pitch Day kicks off the Final Project phase of this class! It’s designed to help you find team members to work with by pitching your ideas to each other in a “Science Fair” format. You will conduct some additional EDA and, based on it, pitch an idea you’d be interested in exploring and communicating through interactive visualization.

Note: For this milestone, there are three deliverables, with three separate due dates listed below.

Table of contents

Over the remainder of the semester, you will work in teams of approximately 4 people to build an interactive narrative visualization that addresses a question on one of the 6 subthemes about housing affordability in Greater Boston. Teams may pursue a final project topic that is not one of the six subthemes, with the caveats that 1) it still needs to relate to housing affordability in Greater Boston and 2) you need to be a group of 4 people and 3) you need to get instructor approval.

The interactive narrative visualization you make – how it is structured and designed – will be entirely up to you and your teammates. For instance, you might follow a strongly author-guided narrative (e.g., a scrolly or stepper slideshow), be fully reader-driven (e.g., an interactive data dashboard), or lie somewhere in-between (i.e., the “martini glass” structure).

The final project will unfold over a sequence of milestones to give you plenty of opportunities to get feedback on your progress from your peers as well as the teaching staff. Pitch Day is the first milestone, and is designed to help you find team members to work with via a “Science Fair” format. It is also a way to get feedback on your project idea, allowing teaching staff to help provide feedback on potential data, scoping, and research questions. The more effort you put into the presentation, the more you will get out of the result.

Remember, this is not your final project presentation — so your ideas don’t need to be fully polished! Rather, think of pitch day as a great moment to experiment with ideas you might like to focus on for your final project. You don’t have to stick with the topic or idea you pitch—you will have plenty of time over the rest of this semester to change and develop it based on the group you are working with (and indeed, we’re expecting your ideas to evolve as everyone on your team weighs in!).

Your Tasks

  1. Browse the six subthemes and choose one that you’d be interested in addressing as part of the final project. This subtheme can be the same one you began to explore as part of A2, but you are also welcome to pick another one. Each subtheme has datasets listed and several background readings. Read through at least one of these readings to familiarize yourself with some of the issues at stake for housing affordability (you may have already read some of these articles in previous assignments!).

    Note: Since A2, we have released additional data for the subthemes as well as collated links to current policies under debate related to the subtheme. These datasets are available in the same Google Drive folder as before. Please tell us if you don’t see a dataset listed on the subtheme pages.

  2. Conduct some preliminary data exploration to identify a question you would be interested in exploring more deeply as part of your final project. Note: this exploration can pick up where you left off with A2, and explore a particular question more deeply. Note also: this exploration does not need to be as exhaustive as your A2 submission. Rather, conduct sufficient exploration to determine that the data can answer the question you are posing in rich detail (essentially a “feasibility test”). In the subsequent milestone, you and your team will analyze the dataset more thorough to identify how specifically you will address the question you’re posing.

  3. Put together a 5-minute pitch slide deck. Your pitch deck should cover the following content:

    1. On your title slide, include the subtheme you have chosen and crisply state the question you are interested in exploring in the final project, and validated through initial exploratory analysis.

    2. (~1 min) Your motivation for addressing this question. For instance, consider showing highlighted screenshots/clippings from the background readings (or other news articles you have found). Or, if your motivation stems from your experiences or stories you’ve heard from friends and family, consider how you can communicate this through slides.

    3. (~1 min) Screenshots of your preliminary analysis results that demonstrate both the feasibility of answering your question with the data we have provided (and any additional data you might have found) as well as the follow-up analysis you would like to conduct to over the rest of the final project to explore and communicate your question more deeply.

    4. (~30 secs) Who is your audience, and what is the purpose or goal of the narrative visualization you hope to construct? For instance, are you trying to help policymakers identify particular issues that need to be addressed? Or, are you hoping to communicate to the general public to raise their awareness about an issue? Or, are you trying to make a case to a specific subgroup, e.g. suburban homeowners?

      It is essential that you have a clear audience for your data visualization as it will help you determine how to frame and communicate the data. For instance, if your audience is more knowledgeable about the topic, perhaps you’re able to dive into the specifics more directly. On the other hand, if you’re speaking to a more general audience, perhaps you need to convey more background first. If your audience may be skeptical of your narrative, you may have to work to dispel some common myths they might hold (e.g. “building housing for families with schoolage children will be a drain on town resources”).

    5. (~2 mins) Provide several examples or precedents of how to reach this audience and achieve your stated purpose.

      Every data visualization project starts with looking at precedents or examples for inspiration. You might select a precedent for several reasons: perhaps you wish to emulate a visualization’s narrative structure (e.g., author-guided, reader-driven, martini glass) or genre (e.g., slideshow, poster, comic, etc.); or, perhaps you like aspects of the visual encodings, animation, or interaction design that you’d like to adapt (e.g., representing people through iconography, adopting a more illustrative aesthetic, eliciting your reader’s beliefs first, etc.). For each precedent, explain why it is relevant to your audience and the question you seek to explore.

  4. Present your pitch, in class on Wednesday, March 13. Given the size of this class, we will organize you into smaller groups of 8–10 people who are interested in addressing similar sorts of questions and that will meet in a variety of rooms to facilitate conversation. You will then present to each other in a “science fair” format: each person in the group will present their pitch (either playing the pre-recorded video, or delivering the slides live), with time after for Q&A. Once everyone has pitched, we will use the rest of class time to form project teams. See our advice on forming teams below.

Final Deliverables and Deadlines

Given the logistics of Pitch Day, these deadlines are final—no extensions will be given, and you may not use any slack days to extend these deadlines. The first two deliverables should be completed individually. The final deliverable must be completed as a team.

  1. By 11:59pm on Monday, March 11, please submit this short Google Form to register the subtheme and question you’re interested in exploring, as well as 3–5 keywords that describe your project or interest in the subtheme.

    The TAs will use your answers to cluster you into groups of 8–10 people to whom you will pitch your ideas with the aim of forming project teams. Given the size of our class, we expect to meet in multiple rooms: you will receive an email by end of day Tuesday, March 12 with your room allocation.

  2. By 9:30am on Wednesday, March 13, please submit your pitch on Canvas and deliver it to your group in class.

    Note: you are welcome to either pre-record your pitch as a 5-minute video and play that during in-class presentations, or deliver your pitch live. If you choose to pre-record your pitch, you are welcome to submit the video on Canvas. Otherwise, please submit your slide deck as a PDF. (If you will be delivering your pitch live, and will be conveying explanations of your analysis results and precedents via narration, please make sure to include it as bullet points in the presenter notes as in your PDF.)

  3. By 11:59pm on Wednesday, March 20, you should have formed your final project team. Register your team by submitting this Google Form.

    Most teams should involve 4 people—in exceptionally rare circumstances, the course staff may allow smaller or larger team sizes; but, you should get explicit approval from one of the instructors first, and you should be prepared for your request to be declined.

    We expect that conversations to form teams will begin as during Pitch Day, and many teams might even be ready to form by the end of the session or shortly thereafter. After Pitch Day, you can use this forum thread to find team partners asynchronously—we encourage you to post your pitch (video or slides) to make it easier for others in the class to find you based on your interests.

Grading

This milestone is worth 20 points. Pitches that squarely meet the criteria (i.e., the “Satisfactory” column in the rubric below) will receive a score of 16/20 (80%). We will use the following rubric to grade your assignment. We will determine scores by judging how well you define and motivate the question you’re interested in addressing in your final project, the richness of results of your preliminary analysis, the breath and analysis of precedents, and finally the clarity of your presentation.

Component Excellent Satisfactory Poor
Data Question & Motivation An interesting question (i.e., one without an immediately obvious answer) is posed. You went above and beyond in finding extra materials to help define the problem. And that information is presented clearly and makes sense.
(5 points)		 A reasonable question is posed, and is relatively well-grounded in the materials provided. The presentation begins to demonstrate an understanding of why this issue is important and worth addressing.
(4 points)		 You can lose points for any of the following:
(a) question is difficult to understand, vague, or posed too broadly to be addressable in a final project
(b) motivation or cited evidence is missing, communicated poorly, or is mismatched to the question
Preliminary Analysis Results Compelling initial analysis that not only demonstrates that the question can be addressed via the provided datasets, but also proposes ways to derive, extend, or join additional data/variables (e.g., from multiple provided datasets, or from external third-party datasets) in future analysis.
(6 points)		 A sufficient analysis was conducted to validate that the provided dataset(s) can plausibly be used to address the posed question.
(4.5 points)		 You can lose points for any of the following:
(a) missing preliminary analysis
(b) insufficient analysis or unclear story about your results that suggest concerns about whether the question can be addressed as part of a final project
Audience & Purpose — The audience you seek to address, and the purpose your final project would play, is clear.
(2 points)		 You can lose points for any of the following
(a) if you audience or purpose is not specific (e.g., “everyone” is too broad a definition and will not help inform your design process)
(b) if there is a mismatch between the question/problem you seek to address and your choice of audience/purpose
Examples & Precendents You’ve identified particularly relevant, creative, or unusual precedents to inform your final project—e.g., by looking beyond the usual sources and examples we’ve covered in lecture. Your analysis richly describes how choices in genre and affordance could yield a compelling experience for your audience and purpose.
(6 points)		 Your precedents are well-chosen and suit the problem you have selected. However, casting a wider net might turn up more diverse design opportunities you might not have considered. Your analysis, similarly, does a nice job of describing what might be reusable/adaptable for your project, but could better connect to impacts on your audience and purpose.
(4.5 points)		 You may lose points for any of the following:
(a) it’s not clear how the precedents align with the problem or audience
(b) it’s not clear how the precedent serves as a source of inspiration, or how it is helpful
(c) a discussion of precedents is missing or shallow
Initial Form Submission & Relevant Keyword Tags — You submitted 3–5 keywords that are relevant and descriptive of your project direction.
(1 points)		 No or fewer than 3 keywords provided.
(0 points)

Advice

Project Pitches

  1. Please make use of ample visual aids throughout your presentation. Remember that you are pitching your peers on your idea, with the goal of forming teams. So, the more engaging your presentation, the easier time you’ll have finding other people who are also interested in your topic. You should not be talking “straight-to-camera” for 5 minutes.

  2. If you wish to pre-record your pitch, there are lots of software available to record videos from your screen and webcam. Some suggestions include Quicktime (which is built into macOS), or using Zoom to record both yourself and and your slides via screen share.

  3. Here are some examples of pitches from previous semesters:

  4. To help you find precedents, we’ve curated a list of visualization blogs and social media follows. Other places that you might find great examples of visualizations include /r/dataisbeautiful and annual “Year in Graphics” that various newsrooms curate (e.g., The NYTimes in 2022, 2021, and 2020, The WaPo in 2022, FiveThirtyEight in 2022 and 2021 and so forth).

Forming Teams

To facilitate a cohesive team and healthy dynamic, we encourage you to discuss the following issues as you form your team:

  1. What are your interests in the course? What skills or domain knowledge does each member bring to the table? What do you want to learn? And what grade are you targeting?

  2. What is your schedule like? What days and times of day are you available to work on this class project? When can you find a time to meet? Plan a time when your group can have regular meetings outside of class, so it’s on your schedule now and for the rest of the semester.

  3. Have you ever worked in a group before, and what are some of the challenges you faced? Explain your weakness in group work so the rest of the team can help support you.

  4. Pick a project manager. As we’re all aware, the semester can get busy and it’s easy to lose track of things. The project manager will help keep the group coordinated, facilitate communication between group members, and help everyone stay on track. The project manager will also be the primary contact with the course staff and client.