Please forward to high school history teachers: Task-specific programming in social studies data viz

Hi,

We built this tool, DV4L (Data Visualization for Literacy), to help teachers quickly create data visualizations for social study classes. This is currently a minimum viable product (MVP) version of our tool, and we would like to collect your feedback so that we can improve! 

• Please take a few moments and try out our tool at http://b48ca06e.ngrok.io/index.html
• We intend for DV4L to be intuitive and easy to use, so you shouldn’t need any instructions to start. (If you ever see a screen with ‘TOO MANY CONNECTIONS’ on the top, please just wait for a few seconds and refresh the page.)
• After you have tried out the tool, please take a few minutes to fill out this survey at https://forms.gle/jASed4f7GfTZD9xa8. 
  

We would really appreciate it if you could do this by Sunday Dec 8th to meet our class requirements. 

Feel free to share this with any other teachers or students who would like to try this out. Thank you so much!

I have been working with a team of four University of Michigan Computer Science students (in a class with Elliot Soloway) to develop a data visualization tool for history classes. They have a prototype ready for testing, and they need user data for their class by Sunday, December 8. Could you please forward this to any high school (or middle school) history teachers you know? They would also love to get some feedback from high school history students, too.

Here are three reasons why I’m excited about this tool.

First, the team really listened to us, our history professor collaborator (Tammy Shreiner), and the social studies teachers who gave us feedback on different data visualization tools. One of the students drove 2.5 hours to attend a participatory design session with social studies teachers in October. As an example, there are driving questions for each database, to guide students in what they might inquire about — that’s a specific request from Tammy.

Second, this is a tool for history inquiry. Data visualization tools like Vega-Lite and CODAP are terrific. (Readers of this blog know how impressed I am by Vega-Lite.) But they’re not designed for inquiry. As Bob Bain has taught me, historical inquiry starts from two pieces of evidence or two accounts that disagree. This tool is designed to support comparing different pieces of evidence, and maintaining a trace of what you’ve explored. Inquiry is about comparison, not from building a single visualization.

Third, this is task-specific programming in a subtle and interesting way. You build visualizations by making choices from pull-down menus on the left. As you find interesting graphs, you save them to the right. When you want to remember what the graph is about, you hover over it and get a textual representation of what pull-down menus generated this graph. I’m arguing that hover text is a program —- it’s a representation of the process for generating that graph, and it serves as a reminder of where you’ve been. It’s a program whose value is in reading it, not executing it.

Amy Ko told me once (I’m paraphrasing) that a program is a description of a process for the future. Using a tool is for now. A program represents the future. This program could be executed by the user in the future — set the pop-up menus to the same values, and you’ll get the same visualization. More importantly, the program represents the past and serves as a reminder for what you can do next.

Please do pass this around so that our team can get a sense of what’s working and what’s not in this prototype. Thanks!