Checkpoint 3: Supporting a Claim with Evidence

Introduction

The goal of this assignment is to help you formalize a claim for your final project and to develop data-based evidence in support of that claim. In this checkpoint, you will be writing about one-third of the text that will appear in your final project essay.

A claim is a statement that something is a certain way or happened a certain way. A claim needs to be proven or disproven with evidence. It’s a suggestion for what is true, even though not everyone might agree that that thing is true. A claim is different than empirical evidence. When we report what a visualization empirically shows us (more people in the US died of x than y in 2020), this is evidence. The claim that you record should not be a summary of what we see in any visualization; it should be a more debatable statement that the visualization would serve as evidence of (Populations that have been historically marginalized by the medical community continue to be underserved when it comes to x).

Instructions

  1. Load your dataset into Tableau.
  2. Create at least four visualizations with your dataset.
  3. Write captions for each that include the following:
  • Description: What is this a visualization of? How did you create it? Reference the source, the selected variables, the geographic and temporal scope, and the plot type. If you applied filters, explain that.
  • Summary: What is one fact we can derive from the visualization?
  • Interpretation: How we can interpret that fact? What claim might it support?
  1. Select two of the visualizations that you created in order to develop a claim about your final project topic. Make sure you are making a claim of fact. Also make sure that your visualizations directly support that claim.
  • For these two visualizations, add clear labels, titles, and captions. Ensure that the visualizations are self-explanatory, meaning that a reader shouldn’t have to look up values to interpret them. Ensure that the visualizations follow visual analytics fundamentals. Export these visualizations as images.
  1. Complete this worksheet.
  2. Once you are finished, upload the worksheet to Moodle in the checkpoint 3 assignment. You don’t need to submit all of the visualizations you created in earlier steps.