This sort of visualization may let me replace bar charts. The panel or facet approach to interleaved discrete histograms might be good for on-screen browsing, but this sort of plot might be easier on the printer and ink supply.
Discussion in Diaspora* post comments provides motivation to explore more code and presentation. (fn:1~
Now I have to see about getting these separate images aligned into one eye-span for analytical viewing.
I was feeling overwhelmed while try to label the bars in interleaved, discrete histogram plots of percentages. So I went back to the basics: lines and points.
There is probably a straightforward way to montage a series of plots together, but I haven't found it yet. Maybe series of this sort of plot panel for different results can be helpful if grouped and aligned on an .html page and seen in a browser.
DrRacket is great for checking code developed with Emacs geiser-mode. After pasting the text from and Emacs buffer and clicking the “Run” button, DrRacket reminds me of all the definitions from previous scripts and REPL experiments that never made it into the file.
This code is still clumsy, the process isn't clear enough in my mind for elegant solutions. But working through the process is great for learning. This may be a way to re-discover the faceting that R/ggplot2 makes possible. I think this is the best way to get a feel for how an individual teachers results are situated in relation to the groups: the individual's department and school.
Racket plot and scribble/html with stacked-histograms and output-xml are working well. It was fun to play with plot keywords and think about printing the data visualizations, but for quick comparisons in the browser the defaults seem better.
I imagine DrRacket will make the code below work with a Windows computer too. How would Windows users be able to find their home directory, Racket's (current-directory) and get their bowser to show “/FD201801/FD-Anketo-Results.html”... The file-separator slashes are probably different too. But that sort of detail can be overcome when a Windows user shows an interest in testing the code and visualization...
It was good training to work with associative lists, to use two a-lists to generate a new a-list. Using a-lists allows for the generation of useful titles and file names that match the data used for the visualization.
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.
