23  Project Planning

Open the template file.

1. Make a copy of this document for your project group (all members + instructor should get editing access)

2. Each person should

• copy the template slide [3rd slide] and insert a screenshot of a visual or table they’ve created for the project
• for each visual/table, add important message (top) and why it matters (bottom)

Important Message: a 1 sentence summary of what is the most insightful finding of the visual

Why it matters: few sentence description of why the audience should care and what they might do with that insight

3. Discuss the order of the slides to tell the broader narrative and what is missing from the current set of visuals/tables.

Use this activity to work through ideas for how to tell the data story (in written and oral formats)

23.1 Today in Class

• Use the above template to finalize the group data story
• Divide up the work for the progress report (see below)
• Work on the progress report
• Before you leave, make sure everyone in the group knows what they are responsible for completing by Thursday’s class.

23.2 Project Milestone 6: Progress Report

• Review the Project Overview in the appendix of the online manual for detailed expectations for the final report.

• Put together a progress report, i.e. a report of your work thus far.

  • As much as possible at this stage, this progress report should work toward meeting the expectations for the final report. (More detailed expectations are below.)
  • There’s no provided template. You should make your own!

• Submit an html of your progress report to Moodle, only ONE submission per group. Be sure to check out your rendered document before submitting it.

23.2.1 Expectations

For this milestone, the following should be finalized:

• the general style and audience of your report
• title & authors
• introductory paragraph (introducing/motivating the research question)
• intro to data paragraph (w’s of the data)
• preliminary data discussion, checks, and cleaning
• preliminary data analysis and discussion, i.e. a first set of numerical & visual summaries that provide important context and broad insight into your research question

The following should be nearly finalized:

• follow-up analysis and discussion
  NOTE: This material should be inspired by Project Milestone 4 (One Number Stories) & 5 (Present Visual), but you’ll need to do some work refining and combining these into one cohesive report.

You should start thinking about but might not yet finalize the following:

• aesthetics of the report (must be cohesive)
• viz aesthetics (must be cohesive)
• final viz details (axis labels, alt text, captions / titles, color schemes, etc)
• concluding paragraph

23.2.2 Feedback

This is a progress report, in the style of the final report. It’s not a rough draft. Thus my general feedback will focus on the big picture:

• did you follow the directions for this assignment?
• is your analysis on the right track?
• does your work thus far demonstrate growth and depth?
• have you made sufficient progress?

I will not be digging into the details (eg: grammar, typos, meeting the expectations laid out in project overview doc, etc). That is work that your group should start thinking about as a team.