viz. - information design

How to write code for images

noelradley — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:45:29 +0000

This page is meant to provide the basics of how to code images for the web. This link is a starting point for learning to code images.

We Feel Fine

EmilyBloom — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:44:26 +0000

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

H/T: Stephanie Rosen

I spent an inordinate amount of time today on Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s thought-provoking website, We Feel Fine. This website scans, or in their words “harvests,” weblogs for statements with the phrase “I feel.” Each of these statements is then represented as a colorful “particle” and organized into a variety of visual and statistical data. The website generates fascinating examples of how people communicate about feelings and gives a powerful impression of both the diversity and similarity among affective statements online. It also raises important questions about privacy. The statements and images on We Feel Fine are from blogs, MySpace and Flickr. Harvested statements whose writers’ also posted images are represented as a “Montage” with the text embedded in the image. Site users can then save and send these postcard-like pieces. For both its creative design and surveillance techniques, We Feel Fine provokes interesting questions regarding affect, privacy and online writing.

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

One of the amazing, and time-sucking, capacities of this site is the endless combinations of categories that users can search. With the options to search among 3,428 feelings, numerous locations (countries, states and cities), genders, ages, weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy) and dates, there are countless possible research queries. How do women feel in the UK when it’s cloudy? How do people in New York describe their apathy? What were people feeling in the US in the months leading up to the 2008 elections?

I thought it would be interesting, in the context of this website, to see who feels “rhetorical” and how they describe this feeling. Although there were only 38 people who felt rhetorical since data collection began in 2005, the responses show interesting uses of the word. While many wrote about feelings towards rhetoric assignments, one of my favorite particles reads, “I feel like throwing some rhetorical grenades.” The implications of data such as this is not always readily apparent and is clouded by the somewhat eerie concept of "harvesting" feelings, but as a means for exploring a specific phrase like "rhetorical," it is a fascinating resource.

Apocalypse Infographed

timturner — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:26:24 +0000

Just spotted a link to this at Andrew Sullivan's blog (h/t): check out the wonderful compilation of explanations of the current financial crisis by graphic designers at FlowingData. Image credit: cypher13 via flowingdata.com

FlowingData is a site that "explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all." To my knowledge, the site hasn't been linked on viz. before--but I think it's something our readers would really like (but then, they probably already know about it).

The economy and design

John Jones — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:24:35 +0000

I saw these two responses to the our recent economic woes on BoingBoing.

The first, posted by guest-blogger Clay Shirky, is a graph showing the distribution of the returns of the S&P 500 in 10-percentage-point increments since 1825. The placement of 2008 adds a chilling perspective to our current crisis.

The second is a humorous response to the proposed auto industry bailout in the form of a car advertisement:

Origins of the bomb

John Jones — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:34:47 +0000

A recent New York Times article on the invention and dissemination of atomic weapons included the infographic above on the travels of the atomic bomb. The article references some new works on the history of the bomb, noting that it was only invented once:

All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book [Robert S. Norris’s Racing for the Bomb] says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

FISA flowchart and alternatives to proposal arguments

John Jones — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:44:57 +0000

So many writing and rhetoric assignments require students to write proposal arguments responding to issues in their schools or communities. While instructors often imagine that these arguments will end up being published somewhere where they will actually have an impact on the community in question, in my experience this rarely happens. For whatever reason, students rarely take the time to polish and submit their work; to get them to take this step, instructors often have to make submission a course requirement, which is an iffy pedagogical move.

I said all that to say this: I wonder if a project like this one outlining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in a flowchart might be a better means of achieving the goal of civic engagement that the proposal argument is supposed to fulfill. Perhaps the problem with proposal arguments in that they often feel artificial. Students have to dream up a project which they may or may not care about, and then translate that project for publication, a time-consuming task that requires a lot of interest on the part of the author. Consider this alternative: taking a difficult idea or concept and explaining it more clearly in another medium. The project’s usefulness—both on its own and as a skill that will be helpful to students outside the classroom—explains itself, and it can be published immediately online. I’m currently preparing for my fall Computers and Writing course, and I’m seriously considering having my students do something like this for a major assignment.

link Ketchup and Caviar (via Boing Boing)

Illustrating magnetic fields

John Jones — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:51:52 +0000

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

I’m not sure how this video was made, but it is really amazing to look at.

As rhetoric instructors spend more and more time teaching new media like video, I think this genre—the instructional video—will become an important skill for students in their own fields.

Here’s a description of the video:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

via Make

Google, Twitter create Super Tuesday mashup

John Jones — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:10:43 +0000

Google and Twitter have gotten together to create a mashup of Super Tuesday related tweets.

via TechCrunch

Track oil donations to presidential candidates

John Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:27:22 +0000

PriceofOil.org has posted a dynamic information graphic showing contributions from the oil industry to U.S. presidential candidates.

In the “relationship view,” the more money a politician has accepted from the oil industry, the bigger their picture is on the map. The more money they have accepted from an individual company, the thicker the line will be that connects them. Elected officials & companies are positioned by their relationships, those that are close together tend to have similar patterns of giving and receiving. In the “table view,” politicians are ranked by their total dollar amount received, together with the companies that donated them.

via Information Aesthetics

Yahoo! political dashboard

John Jones — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:09:19 +0000

Yahoo! has created a political dashboard that collects primary and poll information in a real-time, interactive interface (click on the image for a larger view). I’ve been playing around with this tool since the beginning of the year, and I’ve found the way it mixes different kinds of information to be helpful in following the campaigns.

I’ve seen a couple of stories over the last few days on the influence of the internet on political processes and the impact of social networking sites on the same. As more tools like this dashboard become available to voters, it will be interesting to see how (or if) network effects play a role in the upcoming presidential elections.

Elections and Visual Conventions

Brett Ommen — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:23:21 +0000

The Iowa Caucuses have come and gone, and as we prepare for New Hampshire and the remainder, we have some time to reflect on the visual dynamics of television news coverage of elections. Red and Blue states once had their debut to a national audience, and perhaps we’re on the threshold of a new visual convention.

BEHOLD ANDERSON COOPER’S MAGICAL FLOATING PIE CHART!

Cooper was terribly excited about his 3-D pie chart prior to the coverage, as evidenced by his blog earlier that day . But his excitement was certainly tempered after he gave the chart a whirl. The technology relies on Cooper holding a board flat so that the pie chart can be inserted above it. When Cooper failed to keep the board flat or attempted to move around, the pie chart would dip and bob wildly on screen, obscuring talking heads and causing a general threat to CNN’s punditry. I never saw Cooper pick it up again, and had to chase down a screen grab from the fine folks at Inside Cable.

One could use this as a nice illustration of the problematic of new media. Does rendering a pie chart in 3-D so that Cooper can carry it around the set make it something more than a pie chart? And what does it do to CNN’s other pie charts? In the end, it was difficult to read and wholly deficient to its old media counterpart. Even if Cooper perfects his pie chart toting skills, it’s still just a pie chart. From what I saw, CNN was really pushing the visual information envelope Thursday night, much more than Fox or MSNBC. In addition to rogue pie charts, CNN added a little battery-charger like image below the number for percentage of precincts reporting. Fox and MSNBC, luddites that they are, relied merely on the number. CNN was also coming under fire in the blogosphere for leaving Ron Paul off their Republican pie chart. On both blue and red pie charts, CNN placed the top 4 candidates. CNN had room for Bill Richardson’s scant 2% on the Democratic chart, but no room for Ron Paul’s 10% or Giuliani’s 4%. I didn’t see how the other news networks excluded or included candidates, but that’s just because I was hoping to catch Anderson Cooper wield his pie chart once more.

Video of Cooper and the pie chart.

Tufte course in Austin, December 10–11

John Jones — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:28:59 +0000

Information design guru Edward Tufte will be offering his one-day course “Presenting Data and Information” in Austin on Monday, December 10, and Tuesday, December 11. Here’s the list of course topics from Tufte’s website:

• fundamental strategies of information design
• evaluating evidence used in presentations
• statistical data: tables, graphics, and semi-graphics
• business, scientific, legal, financial presentations
• complexity and clarity
• effective presentations: on paper and in person
• use of video, overheads, computers, and handouts
• multi-media, internet, and websites
• credibility of presentations
• design of information displays in public spaces
• animation and scientific visualizations
• design of computer interfaces and manuals

Registration includes copies of Tufte’s four books, and there is a generous discount for students (it’s basically the cost of the books).

I attended the course when Tufte was in Austin in 2005, and I highly recommend it. He’s an entertaining speaker, the course provides a nice introduction to his work, and the books are must-have texts for anyone interested in information design.

Wikipediavision: Visualizing anonymous edits to Wikipedia

John Jones — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:31:46 +0000

László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology, has created Wikipediavision a mashup of Wikipedia edits and Google maps reminiscent of Twittervision and Flickrvision.

Here’s part of the description from the site’s FAQ:

WikiPediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen. . . . For each wikipedia edit I display the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if the person who made it gave any summary), link to the changes that were made to the article, geographical location of the wikipedia user and the time the edit happened.

Apparently, Kozma’s site skips a lot of edits:

First of all, edits on wikipedia happen at a faster rate, than what could be comfortably readable, so I have to skip some of them. Second, a good part of the edits are done by registered users. Their IP address is protected by wikipedia, therefore I could only display anonymous edits. Thirdly, those edits, where the IP address could not be located are skipped. Fourth, edits that are similar or identical to recent edits are often skipped. This still leaves more than enough to be visualized.

However, the project is still interesting. Hopefully he will expand it in the future.

via Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar

Making type taste good: Typographics

John Jones — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:39:15 +0000

This short film by Boca and Ryan Uhrich provides an introduction to typography while illustrating some of the possibilities of typographic videos.

via information aesthetics

Visualizing time

John Jones — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:48:34 +0000

Here’s a great collection of freehand drawings where the artists were asked to visualize time. The individual images are usually witty statements about their authors’ views of time.

Wolrd Freedom Atlas

John Jones — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:51:47 +0000

The World Freedom Atlas gathers a number of interesting datasets related to world politics and human rights and converts them into a dynamic map display. Interestingly, the visual display helps to foreground the rhetorical choices made by the authors of those datasets. For instance, the map below displays a country’s governmental structure, ranging from a parliamentary democracy (white) to monarchic dictatorship (dark blue) (Cheibub and Gandhi, 2004). Notice that the U.S., a presidential democracy, falls in the middle of the classification scheme, closer to the dictatorships than Canada and Australia, which are both white, as well as Russia, which is a light teal.

via Information Aesthetics

PikiWiki: Drag and drop collaboration

John Jones — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:09:25 +0000

PikiWiki is a free wiki service that adds drag and drop functionality to collaboratively-edited pages. If you are planning on using a wiki in your visual rhetoric class, PikiWiki might be a good option.

Visual Search for Wikipedia

John Jones — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:32:09 +0000

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

A few thoughts about this tool jumped out at me immediately: first, it seems like an excellent way for students (and everyone else who uses Wikipedia) to find related topics for a search term. Additionally, it allows visual thinkers to search the Wikipedia knowledge-base without having to read a bunch of annoying text.

However, I'm not sure that the mind map metaphor is the best one for this task. The searches I have done never go beyond the second-level in the hierarchy, making me wonder what purpose the hierarchy serves. Even if the engine was able to add deeper levels of results, I wonder if a simple clustering structure would be better for the presentation. It is unlikely that the deeper levels would be very well ordered, and the clustering method wouldn’t imply the kind of regimented outline that is the basis of the mindmap. If someone could put this same functionality into an interface like Visual Thesaurus and have it search through a couple layers of pages, the tool would be much more handy.

Visual interfaces reinforce cultural stereotypes

John Jones — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:51:16 +0000

On Monday, the BBC reported on a “six-month research project” that revealed that “MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education” while Facebook users “come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.” In a Tuesday blog post, Clay Spinuzzi pointed out that the research project in question was not intended to be taken as scholarly research. While it is generally a good idea to take any BBC report on science with a Gibraltar-sized grain of salt, one should ask, why did so many others accept these results (Clay lists SmartMobs and BoingBoing as posting favorable comments)? I think the answer has more than a little to do with the visual aesthetics of the two sites.

Consider these screenshots, one from a Facebook profile and the other from MySpace:

The controlled layout of the Facebook group page is in stark contrast with the MySpace page’s repeating background and awkward grid (and this page isn’t even one of the worst MySpace offenders). I wouldn’t be surprised if the quick acceptace of Facebook and MySpace as being respectively high-brow and low-brow wasn’t in some part affected by differences like this one.

Visual literacy, meet information literacy

John Jones — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:55:36 +0000

Libraries: They aren’t just for reading anymore

Meghan Sitar of the University of Texas Library System forwarded a link to the virtual poster session at the 2007 American Library Association conference. The title of the session is “Eye to I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy.”

According to the description

The poster sessions offer practical approaches to teaching information
literacy and visual literacy, new ideas for integrating multiple literacy
skills into your instruction, and tips for collaborations that connect
information literacy, visual literacy, and student learning.

Sounds like fun. The conference is June 24 in Washington, D.C. According to the site, the presentations will remain online until December 2007.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

John Jones — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:10:10 +0000

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This is an incredibly useful tool for those of you who might be teaching information design courses, or are looking for the best way to present data for your own work. The one problem with the periodic table metaphor is that the authors appear to have padded their list of examples so that they will fit into the periodic table format (how often are you likely to use a “Temple” diagram?). But I suppose that’s just a problem with information design metaphors in general.

Evidence of corruption: Distorted maps

John Jones — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 14:47:31 +0000

At the beginning of the month, the Daily Mail published a series of distorted maps of the world, using the map area to track some other variable, like HIV prevalence, alcohol consumption, and military spending.

source: The Daily Mail

HIV prevalence

Because these maps convey information by distorting an image that most people are very familiar with—the Mercator projection—I think these maps are tremendously effective arguments that there is something wrong or off about a particular situation. Perhaps I have this reaction because the subject matter of all of the Daily Mail’s maps is so loaded—elsewhere, there are a number of distorted maps that track time instead of distance, such as this one that tracks driving times from Ipswich to some UK coastal towns, that don’t provoke this reaction in me; however, this might be because I’m not as familiar with a map of the UK as I am with the world map. Also, I can see a use of this technique that would draw on the connections many people have between being fat and being happy. However, in this case, the distorted image does a fantastic job of conveying that the data being tracked represents something wrong, or off base. The only way to improve on this presentation would be to provide some of the hard data to accompany the images.

Baghdad bombings map

John Jones — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:43:51 +0000

The BBC has created an interactive graphic that displays Baghdad’s shifting ethnic population as well as the date and location of bombings in the city. Using the slider at the bottom of the graphic, the user can see small points appear and fade away at the bombing locations. Moving through time, the bombings become more frequent. Not only is this a well-made graphic, it is a disarmingly simple demonstration of the rising violence in Iraq’s capital city.

Translated v. visual instructions

John Jones — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:26:21 +0000

The need for helpful, visual instructions has been covered in many other places. However, I recently bought some “assembly-required” products, and the instructions that accompanied them demonstrated how visuals can be helpful in transcending language barriers.

Here are a few pages from the instructions that accompanied my new external hard drive enclosure:

Though they are not as painful (or haiku-like) as this gem, they would have been pretty useless to me if I was unfamiliar with the hardware. (I’m still scratching my head as to why I would need to "whop" the drive.)

In stark contrast to the tortured translation of these instructions, the assembly guide that accompanied the new TV stand I bought from Ikea over the weekend were utterly simple.

These instructions contain very few actual words--just numbers and diagrams. Notice the elegant simplicity of the instructions on how to find customer support:

I assume that Ikea has had to develop these visual instructions in order to deal with that fact that they sell their products in at least 37 different countries. Even if we allow for some overlap between countries, translating written instructions into that many different languages would be a difficult and time-consuming. This is just another example of the advantages of visual communication in situations that bridge language-barriers.

Image as argument

John Jones — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:46:16 +0000

By John Jones

source: Wikimedia CommonsThe title page of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan

The arguments found in images are related to textual arguments in that each is presented through the selection and arrangement of disparate elements for some purpose. Though those purposes can range from persuasion to aesthetic pleasure, the fact that they are purposive places them in the realm of rhetoric.

Though photographs and realistic painting are arguments by this definition—they are composed, in that the image’s angle is chosen by the painter or cropped by the photographer and the composition and elements present in each are determined by their authors—this argumentative purpose is more apparent in other media, like collage, or double-exposure photographs, for these methods emphasize their own composed structure through the arrangement of the disparate or fantastical elements that they consist of.

Another category of visual argument is that of the "visual confection." In Visual Explanations (1997) Edward Tufte argues that the confection is different from the examples listed above—photos, collage, etc.—in that confections are fantastical visual structures designed to illustrate written arguments. In this description, diagrams, flowcharts, and iconic images that are created to specifically support written arguments can be called visual confections. One example of a confection is the title page from Thomas Hobbes‘ Leviathan. Tufte argues that this image, which is arranged to illustrate the argument of the book, fits the category because it is explicitly connected to the author’s textual arguments.

In-class OmniGraffle assignment

Kristin C — Wed, 03 May 2006 19:44:17 +0000

Notes for the Instructor: This assignment is designed to introduce students to OmniGraffle and give them practice in using it. However, instructors may also tweak the assignment to achieve specific goals related to the course; for example, OmniGraffle is an excellent resource for, among other things, brainstorming ideas for paper topics, or thinking about structure and organization in writing (it presents a more flexible, visually-organized model than, for example, a “Roman-numeral” outline). It can also be used to complement reading exercises as a way to “visualize” how arguments or texts are constructed. This assignment asks students to take specific set of topics, or topoi, (selected either by the students or by the instructor), and map them, creating a visual representation of the various connections between ideas. Instructors can plan on using one full class period to work on this project, at the end of which students can submit their maps to the teacher folder saved as .pdf files. As points of reference, you can see one example on this page, and another example is attached.

Sample OmniGraffle mindmap

About OmniGraffle: OmniGraffle is a flowchart program that enables users to create a “mind-map” of a topic or set of ideas. It is very easy to use and employs a simple drag-and-drop interface, so very little class time is needed to show students how to make their idea maps. Since OmniGraffle enables a range of useful projects, any class can benefit from its use. Students can create visual representations that explore a range of topics, from an individual work (such as a poem, an editorial, or even a video clip) or idea to the complex interactions among different texts, ideas, and discussions. For more information about this software and its applications, see the CWRL’s page on OmniGraffle and other “mind-mapping” technologies.

Assignment Description: Becoming familiar with OmniGraffle and mapping connections between various topoi

Category: Individual or Group project

Goals: This project is designed to introduce students to the OmniGraffle software and give them practice in producing mind-maps, visual representations of their own ideas that will help them “see” the connections between various topics.

Tasks:

Working either individually or in groups, students will create OmniGraffle projects based on topoi related to the first writing assignment.

Proposal websites

Mariela — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 20:03:02 +0000

Notes for the Instructor: This version of the proposal argument focuses on a realistic choice of topic that demonstrates the "think globally, act locally" principle. The goal is to encourage students to write their proposals as if their audience is made up of people with the power to solve the problem. Some student samples are included below. Instead of writing a traditional essay to make their proposals, students will create websites to explain and argue their claims. To implement this assignment, the instructor will need to relate this prompt to the content of the course (by specifying what type of prompt is appropriate) and determine exactly what format the website should take (that is, how many pages it should include, what type of layout is to be preferred, and what sort of content is appropriate).

Assignment Description: Creating a website that makes a proposal argument

Category: Individual project

Goals: For this project, you will construct a proposal argument on a controversial issue of your choice. Your central claim must make a proposal, and it must be arguable. Additionally, you are to make your argument as though you are writing for an audience with the power to solve the problem. A proposal argument answers the question, "What should we do?," although you might argue against a proposed course of action instead. The final product will be a website designed and written to make this argument.

Building a Proposal Argument:

Does something at UT or in your hometown need to change?
Does a group that you belong to need to figure out how to get more members?
Has someone proposed a solution that you think won't solve a problem?

After you've identified a problem, you'll want to think about a solution. Is it something we can live with? Or do we need to address it immediately? You'll need to consider a variety of solutions, including steps that might already have been taken.

Once you've examined several options, you'll want to propose the solution that you think is best and give good reasons. Things you should take into consideration:

Would it be a good idea to do nothing? Why or why not?
Does your proposal do the best job of correcting the problem?
Is your solution feasible--is it doable, practical, and affordable?

Finding a Topic:

Consider the topic of your earlier papers and find a proposal angle on it. If we understand the causes of binge drinking, what can we do at UT to address those causes and solve the problem? If the Top Ten Percent law has bad effects, what can we do to solve the problems the law creates?

Developing Your Content

To write an effective proposal, you'll need an effective problem statement. You have to argue to establish (or deny) the existence of a problem, its significance, and its major causes.
You'll also need to make it clear that you are arguing for a particular solution (even if that solution is not opting for one that someone else has suggested). You will argue that a solution will or will not reduce or eliminate a problem and that the solution will or will not be desirable, affordable, and feasible to implement.
Remember that your solution doesn't have to solve the world's problems. Your proposal should solve your problem, but don't get carried away with the idea that your solution might solve all problems.
You'll need to have fair consideration of alternative positions on the problem and on the solution, with responses in the form of concession and rebuttal.

Choosing an Audience

For this project you will choose the best audience for your proposal. This audience might be an individual or group with the authority to enact your proposal. (You may need to do some research to determine who this is.) Or, you might choose an audience that is indirectly involved with the actual decision making. For example, you could aim to persuade a relevant group to attend a particular event or write their own letters to an authority suggesting a particular course of action. Be sure to construct the website so that this specific audience will find it persuasive. Along these lines, you'll need to organize your website to reach this audience and choose appropriate appeals, style, and tone. You will also need to think carefully about the kind of content (images, charts and graphs, links to other pages, etc.) that will strengthen your proposal.

Choosing a Format:

Your choice of audience will determine your writing style and the format of your web site. For example, your web site proposal might include links to other pages and an introductory page encouraging your audience to visit the site.

To creat multiple pages within your web site, you will want to try breaking your argument into sections with clear headings and subheadings. Likewise, you might experiment with using bulleted lists, tables, and charts as appropriate.

Grading:

Demonstrated ability to construct a proposal argument.
Choice of a significant and arguable claim.
Demonstrated ability to use well-chosen, fair and sufficient appeals to ethos, logos and pathos to support your claims (including appropriate graphics)
Serious consideration of alternative solutions, with appropriate use of concessions and rebuttals.
Effective and fair use of other authors as allies or as opponents.
Confident but civil advocacy of your own position.
Proper use, citation, and documentation of source material.
Effective organization to create a clear line of argument.
Clear and precise sentence-level rhetoric (grammar and style).

Student Samples
Brown Paper Towels by Yumiko Nakajima
FAC Building Renovation Issues by Sundew Shin

PowerPoint 101

moserjos — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 16:09:53 +0000

Notes for the Instructor: This assigment is designed to introduce students to Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software. Students are asked to work in groups and create presentations related to the content of the course (the instructor may wish to generate a list of acceptable topics). This assignment is designed to last no more than 2 or 3 class meetings: students will choose (or be assigned) their groups and topics, work on the presentations outside of class, and then present them to their peers. Students are also asked to submit a two-page paper describing the process of working on the project; instructors may choose to tweak this aspect of the assignment according to the goals of the course.

Assignment Description: Becoming familiar with PowerPoint

Category: Group project

Goals: This project is designed to introduce students to Microsoft’s PowerPoint software and give them practice in using it by producing an organized presentation to be given in class.

Tasks:

Working in groups of (around) four students, create a PowerPoint presentation incorporating both images and text.
Each presentation should be organized around a clearly defined topic related to class discussions and readings.
Presentations should focus on being both informative and interesting.

Guidelines:

Each presentation must contain a minimum of 10 slides and last approximately 10 minutes.
Students must incorporate both text and images into their presentation; additionally, the images need to be informative and clearly related to the content of the presentation.
Each group must also hand in, on the day of their presentation, a 2-page paper describing the presentation and reflecting on the process of creating it.
These 2-page papers need to be double-spaced, use a font of no more than size 12, and include the names of all four group members.

Suggestions: Groups will be given some time to work on their projects in class, but are also expected to meet at least once outside of class to discuss the topic, plan the presentation, and divide different responsibilities among members of the group.