ASSERT model and my project

1) Ask a Question

            At this time, my question is: how can I meaningfully represent the lives and intersections of Somerville College’s female literary community in a way that is informative and brings attention to an under-examined group of authors/literary influencers? I think I’ve sufficiently narrowed down my question, as, per Ferster’s advice, I’ve narrowed by time period (approx 1900-1920; this may change slightly), place, and people.

This chapter reminded me that, in all the thinking I’ve done about what I want to represent/what argument I want to make about the particular group I’m looking into, I’ve yet to define my audience in order to follow Ferster’s advice of personifying them (48). I envision my audience as individuals like me: readers interested in fiction produced in particular time and place who would find aggregated information about lesser-known/out-of-print authors useful. I think this could be scholars—but I want it to be accessible/useful to a non-scholarly audience (for instance, I have both a scholarly and personal interest in the topic so I think the project should be based in scholarly sources but presented in a way that invites a non-scholarly audience to make use of it). I could also see, though, making it into a specifically scholarly project eventually because there is so little scholarship on this network of individuals.

I’m also taking note, though, of Bill Ferster’s observation and advice that “Not all visualization projects are initially driven by questions. In some situations the project begins with a unique set of data that is so potentially rich that the process begins by exploring the data first to find questions to further explore” (59). This is really how the process has been for me, in that I discovered the network of authors and wanted to work with this information but didn’t have specific questions; my questions might get altered the further I dig into the data, for instance if I stumble on something unexpected that leads me in a slightly different direction.

2) Search for Information 

My data will primarily be a combination of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. For primary sources, I’ve got a copy of the published diary of one of the authors I’m studying and for some of the authors, digital copies of their works are available online. For secondary sources, I have a biography of one author and a couple of monographs on relationships between some of the authors. The Somerville College website and Wikipedia both have some basic biographical information as well. I also have access to the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s volume on the interwar years, which has information on a lot of British authors (of varying degrees of notoriety) which is a very helpful reference for biographical data and finding further overlaps between authors.

3) Structure the Information

  I’ve chosen VisualEyes as means of structuring my information because it’s a tool that contains what I believe (at this point, at least) I need to represent and make sense of my data. My data (biographical info, bibliographic info, and a spatial element) are what Ferster would define as “multidimensional” in that “a number of attributes can be attached to each item being represented” (77). In order to create a “richer description of the item,” I can use VisualEye’s drop down feature so users can select the author of interest and view a short biography (and picture of the where possible) and list of their works and the timeline feature can illustrate major stages in their lives, such as years at Oxford and year spent abroad (where applicable). For pages that may not have an interesting geographical feature (for instance, authors who didn’t go abroad during WWI), I want to borrow some of the tactics used by the Tibetan history project on the VisualEyes website, which uses compelling images in combination with maps. I can use books covers, images of the authors, pictures of the college, images from WWI, etc.

5) “Envison the Answer”

My data is qualitative rather than quantitative, although as I was informed in my research methods class, the two categories are a spectrum rather than binaries, so I hesitate to overgeneralize. Nonetheless, the qualitative data analysis tools Ferster describes sound most useful in my case. I hadn’t considered that my data set would be large enough to warrant coding, but I might be served to employ a coding scheme (even an informal one) as a way to “wrangle” my data as I gather it. Some of the texts I have access to are in digital format so I may also find text analysis tools like word frequency analysis useful in identifying patterns that I’ve overlooked—for instance, themes that tie together disparate novels or  terminology used during the time period (which Ngram viewer could be useful for).

6) “Represent the Visualization”

I’ve discussed in my entry for chapter 3 how I picture the visualization looking and operating. By using VisualEyes’s drop down menu feature, I can “limit the number of items a user needs to keep in his or her head at any given time” (116) as Ferster advises in order to organize my data in a manageable, user-friendly way.

Ferster’s discussion of aesthetics and his remark that “a number of studies have shown a strong positive correlation between the perceived aesthetic quality of the visualization and the willingness of users to take the time to interact with it” (121) reinforced my desire to use engaging images in my project. For me, reading is as much a visual and tactile experience – rich illustrations and the feel of the page—as an intellectual one, and I hope to transpose those experiences into the digital where possible. For readers like me who do judge a book by its cover art, being able to experience the visual pleasures of reading while learning about authors and books that might interest them would add an important element.

Ferster’s discussion of displaying networks and radial maps gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I can visualize the relationship between the individuals I’m featuring. The “radial network map of Dolly Madison’s visitors in 1841” on page 148 is, I think, a beautiful way to display social networks, and I would love to be able to create something like that (even if for a later iteration of the project).

7) “Tell a Story Using Data”

I find the “Design Tensions” section of this chapter particularly useful in prompting me to consider how I want/should balance narrative versus exploratory visualizations and how those characteristics will look in my project. For instance, I want my voice to be present in the sense that I want the project to make an argument, but at the same time its meant to be something users can “mess around with.” I’m not sure how to get the argument/point across; perhaps in a page providing an overview of the project (potentially also including the history of Somerville College of Oxford, or that could be its own page) where I state outright that the goal is to provide information on previously overlooked contributors to England’s Modernist literary scene.

Work Cited

Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualizations: Insight Through Inquiry. MIT Press, 2013.