ASSIGNMENT TASKS
(30%) Learn more about data science tools in the wild for practitioners
Lot’s of interesting things are going on in the data science landscape. While we won’t be talking about visualization in detail
until later in the semester this podcast hits a number of issues on the head, not only with visualization, but with data science
writ large and with the ability for large numbers of “data geeks” from all ranges of technical skill and ability can come together
and work out data explorations together.
You will listen to the podcast FLOSS Weekly #677 April 20, 2022: Open Source and Data Visualization featuring an interview
with Melody Meckfessel from Observable (https://observablehq.com) who goes into detail about the platform, the purpose and
the community that has emerged there.
You can listen to / watch the show from one of the links below (there are others (i.e. Apple Podcasts) if you search):
• (main page) TWiT: FLOSS WEEKLY 677 OPEN SOURCE AND DATA VISUALIZATION
• (mp3 direct) TWiT: MP3 file direct download
• (youtube) YouTube: FLOSS Weekly #677
§ Task: Listen to the podcast / watch the video and write a 3-5 sentence reaction to the podcast. State in your own words what
you learned, what expanding your knowledge of the topic and what you found interesting about the information you received.
§ Task: Go to observablehq.com and find ONE project. With the one project please enumerate the following:
(a) please give the title, URL and description of the project on Observable,
(b) describe the datasets used in the project (you can just provide 1 sentence summary of the dataset),
(c) provide a brief description of the visualizations used (1 sentence),
(d) describe why you found this dataset / project interesting (no more than 2 sentences).
