Overview of student projects for MIS 376 at AYBU

Project Theme: COVID-19 (or the virus, SARS-CoV-2)

• Project list

The project is intended as an opportunity to demonstrate what you have learned in class while exploring a data intensive topic of interest to you and, if possible, to a client. While you need not identify a client, you will get more out of the exercise if you do so. The client might be someone you have worked, or currently work, for, a mentor, a friend or a relative. Alternatively, your context might be a social or political issue that you wish to learn more about and to influence. Or, perhaps your investigation might be based on public data you have found that might make a newsworthy story.

This will require that you:

1. Identify the problem, issue or news worthy story that interests you (this may be driven by the data you have access to).
2. Find the data required to address the problem.
3. As necessary, assemble the data in machine readable tables.
4. As necessary clean, pivot, and/or join the tables.
5. Begin to formulate your story.
6. Select visuals appropriate for your story (a minimum of five).
7. Create the visuals using data visualisation tools.
8. Complete the story as both a presentation and as an article/report/memo.
9. Also, write up the process you went through to assemble, clean and organize your data and to select your visuals.

A Come to class prepared to provide orally a brief (2 -3 minute) description of the problem you intend to address, the sources of the data, and any problems you foresee (just you talking - no visual aids). Also, by noon on that day put the problem description posting on your GitHub page.
B Make an entry on your GitHub page describing the data you will require for your project. Where are you getting it from, what challenges are you facing in preparing it, how much data is it? How many files? (Due by noon on day of class).
C Be prepared to give a rough run through of your project. It need not be completed, but the final deliverable will benefit from class feedback.
D Prepare a “slide” presentation of no more than 10 slides that tells your story - including your five produced visuals (which you are encouraged to enhance with other tools).
E Deliver a presentation to the class of that story using those slides. Prepare and turn in, in addition to the slides, a written “article” presenting that same story, as if for publication.
F Also, prepare and turn in a 500-1,000 word description of the process you followed with particular attention to the source of your data, how you obtained and cleaned it, any challenges you had to overcome along the way, and the imagined audience that you have prepared and tailored your presentation for, as well as any design choices you made given your intended audience. Make it clear what your objective is: are you informing or are you selling?

By the end of this project, you will learn how you can use data visualization techniques to answer to some analytical questions.

Note: If you choose to use a visualization that is more complex - say, something interactive or an infographic - you may describe or depict it by a sketching and verbally describing it rather than creating it in any tool (not more than one of your visualizations may be handled in this manner).