Week5Reflections-pjmara-PaulMara

week1.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+# Reflection, Week 1
+
+
+
+**Link to vis site**:
+https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2021-nba-player-projections/jayson-tatum/
+
+For the first week of reflection, I chose a subject which I've gotten into the past year. Data visualization of sports stats and basketball!
+
+In this reflection I want to ponder the possible impacts from a visualization like this on the NBA and the world as a whole. There won't be many facts in here but my opinions and what I observe from the site, and from my own reactions.
+
+Below is a screenshot of Jayson Tatum, currently the best player on the Celtics according to this website at least.
+
+![Screenshot of 538 NBA projections vis](./week1Photo1.PNG)
+
+## Consideration 1: Approachability
+
+The first thing in this collection I found myself curious about was the team that I supported. Were we trending up, or down? What about my favorite players on the team? Were they as good as I thought?
+To answer the first couple of questions, I used the searchbar at the top, searching for famous players and players on the Celtics. I was immediately a bit confused by the biggest chart on the page: Wins above replacement projection.
+At least to me, I don't know what that means, and I'm fairly versed in sports. What is more confusing is this wins above replacement metric seems to be the metric that measures how similar the two players are to each other (at least at first glance).
+After reading a separate article about the visualizations I learned that the similarity was based on all of a players stats, not the 'wins above replacement' metric. What the viz was trying to show is how this graph is likely to change based on similarities in other stats categories. This might be evident to someone like a GM or a researcher that decided what players to trade and which to keep, but not to me.
+
+## Consideration 2: Impacts of Visualization
+
+The second question I asked myself was what impact these graphs had on my view of players and teams. I found myself convinced that this source was reputable and that their assesments were accurate. I was surprised with how low some players were considered compared to others, and I wondered why, and if my consideration of them was skewed based on personal opinion or different media outlets stated opinion on a player. Are the numbers always top? Or do some players have intangibles that make them valuable to a team and organization that the statistical models do not cover? I'm not sure but it is defenetely the questions I would ask the creator.
+
+## Consideration 3: Intangibles
+
+I want to think about one example, Celtics rookie Tacko Fall, as I believe he is one of the extreme cases of something I was interested in. On the court, Tacko's stats are honestly quite lackluster. Despite this, the entire Celtics fanbase loves Tacko and wants him to stay with the Celtics. Something like that isn't reflected in a players stats sheet, but it could be reflected on a balance sheet for the organization who he is signed for. It made me realize I was interested in "which team has the most valuable players" and "what makes a player valuable" were the questions most important to me as I looked through the visualizations. 
+
+Thats it for this week!

week2.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+# Reflection, Week 2
+
+Link to visualization(s)
+
+**Link to vis site**:
+https://eagereyes.org/criticism/march-chart-madness
+
+For my second week of reflections, I decided to explore eagereyes, a website by Robert Kosara about vis and communication of data done in vis. He talks about techniques in vis and ideas that map accross the entire space. 
+
+The page I am choosing to review is "March Chart Madness" which is a critique of Robert's...less favorite visualizations from march in 2010. Below is the sample he chose to open with...
+
+![Screenshot of the best ever pie chart](./week2Photo1.PNG)
+
+**Reflection**
+
+Most of this week was instructive for me rather than my opinion on a vis. 
+
+The first photo that is critiqued is a graph of firefox users, all the way at 200 million, and compares it to the 400 active developers. There are steps in between like daily users, beta testers and so on.  However, Kosara points out that there is a constant radius inccrease between rings, even though there is not a constant difference between rings. If it is about showing the difference, then the scale should reflect it!
+
+![Bad Rings](./week2Photo3.PNG)
+
+One more that I want to review is a graph about the EU taxes chart pictured below:
+
+![Triangle Area Example](./week2Photo2.PNG)
+
+Kosara makes the argument that this chart is made in bad faith. I can't help but feel charts like this might be the cause of something like Brexit, or other political movements against the EU. Kosara references the linear vs quadratic trick in vis. The triangles in the picture are sized by their side length proportionally rather than the area. Because the area increases more as side length increases due to the area formula (b*h)/2 for triangles, this scale does not match the actual difference between things. This leads to larger numbers looking at larger areas, which makes the large negative numbers look very bad.
+
+I do wonder if this was done intentionally in this picture and others, or maybe it just happens this way because it is easier to encode in side length and the implications were not understood by the vis designer...it is difficult to tell. 
+
+That's it for this week!
+

week3.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+# Reflection, Week 2
+
+Link to visualization(s)
+
+**Link to vis site**:
+https://graphics.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/Interactives/2018/04/marvel-cinematic-universe-whos-who-interactive/index.html
+
+
+For my third reflection, I reviewed what I think is my facorite ever vis- a 3d map of all of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe)
+I thought it best to examine it from a dimension reduction standpoint because of the material from this past week.
+
+![My boy, Edwin Jarvis, AI Beast](./week3.png)
+
+**Reflection**
+
+First of all, the visualization is amazing to look at. It is visually appealing to click and look around everything. It groups nodes with more links together (I wish they published more on how they made this...) in an appealing way. It presents multiple ways to navigate around the visualization. 
+
+**Navigation**
+
+There are sooo many ways to get around in this vis. The highest level tab selects between characters and movies, so its not really navigation more of a selection of interest. After that, there are categories that each Marvel character can fit into. These categories are places in a bar at the top, and when you select one, it presents you with a filtered view. In this way the top bar is a filtering mechanism, as the vis itself can look quite cluttered. 
+
+Now for the actual navigation around the full list. With a simple click and drag, you can rotate around the entire graph of characters. Right click is a pan, and mouse wheel is zoom. The most compelling part of this vis is when you click on one of the circles. 
+
+A bar pops up on the side and gives a background of the character, telling the reader a bit about who they are, their status in the MCU, who they are played by in the movies, and a picture from one of the movie/shows they are in. Along the botton, and in the vis, are this characters links. They are organized by color, for example a green link means friend. This was a clever way to show a specific association and follows the rules we learned about in our book: this is a categorical list, so hue is a good choice for differentiating between different categories. It also highlights all the links to the current character and grays out ones that are not connected, allowing the user to easily pick out who is connected to the current character. 
+
+**Motivation/Wrapping up**
+
+I believe that this was made purely for fans to enjoy browsing the MCU characters, but it truly is an amazing vis.

week4.md

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+# Reflection, Week 4
+
+Link to visualization(s)
+
+**Link to vis site**:
+
+https://www.chessgraphs.com/
+
+For my fourth reflection, I thought I would check out a vis that I might want to model my final project off of. I am really interested in chess and so wanted to find some vis.
+
+![Chess rating graph](./week4.png)
+
+**Reflection**
+
+This graph was very simple and customizable, which is why it was so fascinating. Some features already exist, and some clearly don't, which is why I wanted to reflect on it.
+
+Along the bottom there shows the categorical values (in this case, the chess players). The x axis is time, Y is the chess rating. The axis are customizable to have max and min values. 
+The user of the website can select the players along the left column. This could be useful for selecting a small subset of players to compare. The differences in color between the players were less than ideal unfortunately.
+
+The graph can also get busy when there are a lot of users on the map. 
+
+![Crowded Chess rating graph](./week4(2).png)
+
+It would be cool if the highlighting the players name would make it show up highlighted in the graph, or stand out in some way. However, the developers of the graph chose a different functionality/approach. When you move your mouse along the x axis, it updates the current data along with the current ratings of the players at the bottom of the screen, and puts markers on the graph to show what point is being used for this selection. 
+
+**Selecting Players**
+
+There are multiple modes for selecting players. One is geared toward someone casually using the tool to see the highest rated players. However, there is also a searchbox to allow a use case of searching specific users and showing thier development over time (not just a top player!) 
+One unfortunate piece of info is that most of the data only extends to 2001 so older players can't really have much information found about them.
+
+Overall, I enjoyed this vis and will likely use it as inspiration for my final project.
+

week5.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+### Original Vis and Critique
+
+Original Vis, Uncovered on r/dataisbeautiful subreddit
+![Original Vis](./week5OriginalVis.png)
+
+(Post linked [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lz8t2i/fertility_vs_life_expectancy_1850_vs_2015_oc_see/))
+
+This original vis has a very specific use case in my opinion. It is meant to show the person looking at the picture that since 1850, there have been dramatic increases in life expectancy and birth rates accross the entire world.
+When I first looked over this vis, I thought that the use case was very specific, and I wished I had more access to the underlying data to explore as I chose to. Also, I wished for interaction so that I could see more detailed information on each element in the vis.
+The use casee was very specific, but it pulled from a bigger, and more general, data pool. This generic data pool had a vis that allowed you to choose between many different dimensions, and vary by time as well.
+I've linked it below:
+
+
+![Well done Vis](./week5SecondSourceVis.PNG)
+(Link [Here](https://www.gapminder.org/fw/world-health-chart/))
+
+#### Reflection and Motivation to select this for remix project
+
+When a user is utilizing a two axis scatter that changes over time, they may want to explore a tight geographical region. The vis on this website did have a search feature, but then you have to search one at a time and they are organized by name. I found myself intrigued by the life expectancy dip during WWI in many countries (discovered using the generic graph tool), I would love to zoom in on Europe and see how the life expectancies changes geographically year over year, but this isn't possible in the current vis.
+I'd love to be able to just move my mouse over to a country and see what its value is rather than remembering the country name and searching it in a box. This fulfills more of a search task but also a new kind of browse task. After all, geographically looking through the data is different than exploring the scatter plot.  
+
+This vis was an instructive week of reflections for me because it was very well put together, unlike some of my previous week choices. However, there seemed to be different use cases and tasks that this vis didn't address. I think it was a valuable lesson to me about seeing in a real world example a case of the task at hand being the most important part of the vis idiom design process.