It:s that time of year again. We got the results for the Faculty Development questionnaires handed out to students in our classrooms. I haven't been programming much, but I think reading the Pollen docs, aoc-racket, and some of the scribble documentation code is helping re-write scripts for readability. During the “make-it-work” stage I get so busy reading documentation and on-line pages (stackoverflow always seems to have a discussion that helps). The re-discovery of Perl Best Practices and a quick reading of the chapter about naming variables is helping too: the general idea of naming variables so that they structure reads smoothly when you use them later.
If I can figure out how to give each plot-pict a name, I'll be able to use pin-over and rt-find to annotate questions. For now only the title text is named. With the title pict named inset let me place the response table without relying on coordinates discovered from a bitmap in GIMP.
データ表から意味を取るのが難しいようですが、アンケート結果の視覚化するのが能力開発に繋げることができる。基礎プログラミングとデータ視覚化の授業を作ってから、いろいろな学生(または先生)が自らアンケートを作成と実施、分析できるようになるかもしれない。FDも参加型、 “Nothing About Us Without Us”の理念を行かして 大学の「民衆化」(fn:1) の時代に相応しい動きになります。
This code was broken for a while, the .png-generation portion is still too repetitive. The code takes questionnaire results and provides a faceted (R ggplot2-like) view with an .html page that list questions with a visualization of their results for the individual, the individual's department(faculty), and the department's(faculty's) university.
Experience with Racket's path utilities over the past weeks (and today's discovery that regexp-replace works with paths!) helped to clean up the part that filters plot images.
Other work demands attention and time, but it's awful to leave code in a broken state.
While rushing to finish pasting .png files into a word processor document, I noticed that plots need a title for context. Maybe if I was able to completely avoid office software and stay with generated html pages it wouldn't matter as much, but while pasting images into documents it was hard to see which semester the plots belonged too.
The generated html page was ok when printed from firefox with the Landscape setting but the “float” layout broke with my laptop screen. Looking over css grid again helped with that issue. Printing to .pdf from Firefox is helpful but the files got really big for my recent pages with plot images..
While using questionnaire data to learn plotting, questions come to mind. Averages don't make sense for “ranked” “factors”, for numbered responses to questions about how much a person agrees or disagrees with a question. Maybe seeing the percentage and number of positive responses versus negative responses will help in the search for meaning in the data.
With Racket it is possible to transform and view the data however you like. It's nice to be able to implement a view out of curiosity. I'm hoping the stacked lines with their labels provide enough hints for people to figure out that they are combinations of responses of 4 and 5 in a positive direction, and 1 and 2 in a negative direction.
If there is time to go over the code again there must be less repetitive way to stack negative lines after stacking positive lines. Getting started on that gave me a change to use Racket's define to give the pnt-w-lbl procedure an optional argument.
Years ago with gnuplot I plotted “enthused”熱意 results against “satisified”満足 responses. Naomi Klein quoted a Harpers article by a professor that said he refused to be “cool” like a Marshall McLuhan screen.
For now though, I just want to see how Racket can replace two pages oddly scaled visualizations and averages. It's time to move into other work, after adjusting the css styles so that the generated page fits onto two A4 papers.
Here's proof that the code pasted in below worked in DrRacket:
Faculty Development Questionnaires give me an opportunity to work with Racket. Until now the questionnaire data provided opportunities to learn data visualization with two other languages: gnuplot with Philip Janert's book, and R/ggplot2 with Hadley Wickham's book. But for more regular work I was using emacs-lisp with org-mode. Without weekly practice with language like gnuplot or R/ggplot2, it was always a struggle to get back into the data manipulation and visualization flow once every six months. Recently my regular work goes well with Scheme.(fn:1) Guile Scheme is more compact that org-mode and emacs-lisp for converting jpg images to png and svg images and for generating worksheets, roll-sheets, and seating charts. However, I am not yet able to graph/plot/chart with Guile. Racket's plot lets me work well with Questionnaire data.
It will be interesting to learn how to plot and label points at will, and how to adjust colors, but in the meantime racket/plot's stacked-histograms provide compact visualizations that may serve as springboards for discussion. I made the English version, to make it easier for non-Japanese readers to follow the code. Seeing two versions clearly shows the advantages of Chinese characters for compact information design.
There are eleven questions on the school's questionnaire. The first three questions attempt to gauge students feelings their participation in the class. What are their feelings about how often they `attended`出席 the class, how much they `spoke` in the class, and how much they `engaged` in the class. The next five questions gauge the students perceptions of how well they `heard` the teacher's voice, how they had `seen` the teacher's materials, how well `timed` the teacher's starting and ending of the classwas, how `responsive` the teacher was, as well as how `enthused` the teacher may have been. The last three questions are about overall perceptions of how much the student `comprehended` and `valued` the class, ending with a overall ranking of how `satisfied` the student is with the classes experienced so far. The questionnaires are usually filled out during the 13th or 14th class a 15-class semester.
FDアンケート結果の視覚化への挑戦 1。フリーソフトのエディターEmacs, orgmodeとフリーな言語R, ggplot2と遊びながら、情報デザインを考える機会です。
Faculty Development questionnaire results give me a chance to re-visit Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence and attempt to implement his design ideas with emacs, org-mode and R, ggplot2.
Emacs org-modeの表には無駄なインクがありません。 簡単に生成するテーブル(表)は木下是雄さんの「レポートの組み立て方 」で見る表に負けなません、 すっきりしている。
The html pages exported by org-mode have a high ink-to-data ratio. They remind me of a book about writing for scientists. (fn:1)
色々なデータ表をブラウザーで一目(one eye-span)で見ることができる。まとめて見えるようにするのが一つの原則(Principle).
The browser lets us see several data tables within one eye-span. Orgmode-generated html with some .css styling can implement Edward Tufte's design principle: “one eye-span.”
