Scientific Method vs. Journalistic Process

This weekend, I reflected on the process of completing the first project for my infographics & data visualization course. I spent approximately 120 hours on this project over the past month—which averaged out to 2 hrs 57 min on weekdays and 3 hrs and 10 min on Weekends.

(Side note: I use an app called ATracker to keep track of how much time I spend on specific activities. As someone with ADHD, I have trouble predicting how long it will take me to complete something and even more trouble restricting myself to a particular time-frame to complete a task.

I find that tracking what I am working on and using a work timer are two very helpful tools.)

Originally, I believed that my personal connection to Venezuela was the reason I spent so much time on this project. My second thought was that it was a “productive” procrastination technique for higher priority, but more tedious, tasks. It wasn’t until I was reading through the Functional Art’s chapters 8 and 9 on the Practice aspect of the visualization process that I considered there was an additional reason for why this project took up so much of my time.

The main purpose of this section was to outline the process for creating an infographic, which overall seems very straight-forward:

1. Identify “what story you want to tell, the key point that will be made, have a clear idea of how it will be useful”

2. Gather data

3. Decide how to visualize this data

4. Roughly sketch the visualization

5. Choose style

6. Actually create the graphs/figures

Dr. Cairo states that we need to “start with a strong focus, do as much research as you can, organize, summarize, and then deliver your conclusions in a structured and visually appealing manner.”

I am not sure if this is a more discipline-based difference or a personal difference, but this process is actually quite different from my usual research methods. Although I start with a topic and general research question, my story is not actually determined until after I finish my review of the research literature. I also most definitely never consider how I would visually communicate the topic until after I finish the entire data collection and analysis process.

So I approached this project the same way - what happened to the Venezuelan economy since Chavez was elected?

The process went something like this:

1. Go through a specific data source, clean the data, run descriptives, think of ways to visualize the information, then go to flourish or raw graphs or just use Excel to try out different graph types

2. Often, this process would lead me to determine that the data would be best formatted in a different way for the type of visualization I wanted to use and then I ended up spending hours re-organizing the data and then trying again. I ended up with 54 data files!! I won’t even try to count the number of variables I collected throughout the entire month.

That would be the process for one particular point in the entire story, e.g., the top exports during a particular time range.

I would re-start that process for every question I thought of while working on the project. I hadn’t sketched out a draft with ideas of what type of graphs/figures I would want to use. I went on a blind search for what data was available and (un)fortunately, the answer was… a LOT.

I realize that when I am working on research studies within my discipline, I have been told over and over again that you never want to have a specific point that you want to make when you start the research process because you risk veering towards confirmation bias (only paying attention to the information that confirms your point and ignoring the data that disagrees). I did not go into project 1 thinking: I am going to show how Venezuela’s increasing reliance on petroleum exports and mismanagement of other industries made its economy vulnerable to changing oil prices, leading to an increasingly unstable and weakening economy.

I thought — the situation in Venezuela is terrible and has been getting worse and worse with time — what actually happened? This question does not make it easy to plan out the layout of an infographic. I didn't even know what data I was going to highlight!

Realizing this could not have come at a better time. I am currently coming up with topic ideas for Project 2. I now know that I have to determine the story I want to tell - not just the general topic when I begin this process.

Just in case, I am also going to make sure that the topic is not something I am so emotionally invested in and it helps that my internship applications are now done!