Well, it has certainly been awhile since I last checked in with this blog! Between graduate school, attempting to have a life, and maintaining a side anonymous blog (to reach a different audience niche — I’ll save that for a later post), I did not even notice that one of the lesson plans for the DWRL I wrote last year posted to the site this past October!

This one comes complete with a video tutorial that I made and edited with the audio equipment provided by the DWRL.

Preview:

In today’s information economy, the abundance and production pace of information can make it difficult to follow news coverage of any given topic or event. Whether you are comparing different coverage of the same topic by more than one news source, tracking coverage of a topic in a single source over a period of time, or following a single news source in order to track popularity of topics, data visualization can help identify and neatly summarize trends and patterns, or textual data, in service of an argument that draws from this data.

However, as discussed in previous data visualization work by the Digital Writing and Research Lab, data visualization can be unintentionally misleading or unnecessary. Deciding what information should be summarized by visualization and selecting the appropriate format is part of selecting “the most appropriate mode of persuasion,” to paraphrase Aristotle, for a rhetorical situation….

Link here.