EOW05: Survey Answers

Examples of correct answers to this week’s survey

Example Answers to The Questions

I didn’t ask you to make anything with Vega-Lite or its off-shoots. If we were to have a class assignment where you had to make something with it (either Vega-Lite or Altair), what would you recommend I require students to make?

*This question served to test your understanding and application of the capabilities of Vega-Lite, particuarly good answers were specific as was asked (they provided a concerte example or enough detail that could be the basis of a concrete assignment). Good answers also provided an assignment which leveraged the specific utilities of Vega-Lite which are not present in chart typology tools like Excel such as overlay, interaction, or specific encodings/manipulations/formatting that could not be easily achieved using a different approach. *

What tool (language, visualization API/Toolkit) would you use to make this chart?

There are many answers to this one, the important take aways are you want to use something that allows for non-standard chart types and allows for easily customized inclusion, manipulation, and positioning of details (you would have to not only be able to overlay two charts (the ‘bar plot’ and the line charts), you would have to manipulate their color, position, and include the numeric labels). Many technologies we discussed could accomplish this with varying degrees of ease (Matplotlib, Altair, D3, etc.), but really the important thing to note here is you DO NOT want to use something like Excel or Tableau for this - they are not meant for custom tasks like this, they are meant for standard designs, even if you were able to recreate something similar to this using one of them (which I honestly don’t think is possible), you would have to have contorted the application in ways it was not meant to be used and it would still probably take you significantly longer than alternatives.

How would you describe the distinction between a “visualization grammar” (or grammar-based approaches in general) and “component libraries”/“low level libraries”?

Another open ended question without a definitively correct answer, as long as your answer showed a grasp the toolkit categories and some thought went into which technologies were included in each and what the difference was, you were good! Some good distinctions that came up were related to the ’level of abstraction’, ‘degree of contol’, and ‘user experience’. Prof. Gliecher notes that for him the big difference is that components/low level tools are procedural whereas grammars use declarative techniques to describe teh relationships between parts (although this is not a clean distinction - D3 has elements of both)