Miller Olson
Professor Uhe
IS445- Data Visualization
Final Project, Spring 2024
Something that I really appreciated about this class was that we weren't just blindly analyzing data. Hence the name, we were able to create actual visualizations that helped me understand the data much better. In other classes that are teaching students about data, I feel as though they are often just working with large amounts of data with no real goal or outcome. In this class, we are exploring data through actually making graphs and visuals withthem, which is something that really helped me better understand data analytics. Another big takeaways from this class is that creating graphs not only helps me understand the meaning of the data, but it also helps me explain it to others. Especially apparent in this project, there are a variety of ways you can use data visualizations to describe the purpose of a dataset and knowing who your audience is one of the most important things. You can create a visualization that includes a lot of valuable information, but if it is targeted at the wrong group or more advanced than their skill set, it will not be as valuable. Therefore, one of my biggest takeaways from this course is being able to understand who your audience is and what kinds of visualizations are best suited for certain types of people. Overall, I think there wasn't a lot of things that needed to be improved in the class. On the other hand, I do wish it was more consistent. I liked when we met online because we got to discuss with classmates about our weekly visualizations and do practice programming in Python. Sometimes I felt as though there wasn't a very organized schedule in our class meetings becuase oftentimes they would be cancelled. I think overall, the content of the course was really awesome, but the structure of the class could be organized better.