The serendipity of finding Thomas Grisold and Alexander Kaiser’s (2017) paper (link), whilst looking for recent discussions about feedforward (link) prompted me to think about personal learning journeys.
Thomas and Alexander ask ‘How can unlearning initiate a deep learning process leading to the best version of our self?‘. The volume and quality of resources available to us makes this a very important question.
Notwithstanding the debate about the concept of ‘unlearning’, two excellent links made me think about my ongoing quest to explore visualisation and a better version of my self as a data sharer and storyteller.
The first was Claus Wilke’s (2018) Fundamentals of Data Visualization (link). His welcome message notes that the book “is meant as a guide to making visualizations that accurately reflect the data, tell a story, and look professional”.
I found it through an alert to chapter 16 of the book, Visualizing Uncertainty (link). The alert came from Matthew Kay (link) whose own work on uncertainty visualisation has also been nudging me to a better version of my self.
The second resource was Amy Cesal’s Sunlight Foundation Data Visualization Style Guidelines (link). Amy worked with Zander Furnas to develop the guidelines. There is a copy of these guidelines on GitHub (link).
Amy reflects on her use of a style guide:
Since having a style guide, I have to do less work on the majority of data visuals, because they are already 90% done when they are handed off, if they are handed off at all. I also spend less time testing for colorblindness and text readability, because I’m using pre-tested options. This way, I have more time to focus on larger projects that push the boundaries of our style guidelines, and really make the visuals exceptional.
Amy’s mention of boundaries is where my reading of Thomas and Alexander meets Claus and Amy.
Access to such outstanding visualisation resources disturbs a learned aesthetic. Thomas and Alexander note that:
Feedforward self-modelling involves constructing a desirable image of the self that represents achievements beyond the individual’s current capability. It yields the potential for improvement and rapid changes of behaviour”.
Just as I was drafting this post an alert to Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s (2018) accessible data viz is better data viz (link) appeared in my in box. Cole observes “Often, when we are creating charts and graphs, we think of ourselves as the ideal user. This is not only a problem because we know more about the data than the target user, but because other users might have a different set of constraints than we do.”
My hope is that from the inspiration of these great resources, I can start a process of deep learning about how to share in plain sight … not as a New Year resolution but as an everyday practice.
Photo Credit
Photo by Ilya Ilford on Unsplash
