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Directions:  Post a representation of your data collection process. 

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Directions:  Post a representation of your data collection process. 

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Draw from what you shared in your Wakelet for Data Diary #4

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STEP 2: Create a Master Spreadsheet with all the variables

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STEP 2: Create a Master Spreadsheet with all the variables

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Above is a water/beverage tracker that I created. I searched a  couple of templates on Canva and felt none of them was close enough to my visualization. Therefore, I took photos of all my cup / tumbler / thermo and created the visualization manually.

The visualization is pretty much how I tracked my drinking in the past week. I counted the number of cups I consumed and then got a total. To help with an accurate (?) track, I only refilled my bottle when it was empty, while I usually tend to refill my container halfway. In addition, although on the bottom of the containers there is a note of the volume, I was suspicious whether the number was accurate. So I got a measuring cup - and as I suspected, the number was not correct.

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I recorded my Tuesday - Saturday consumption in an audio diary.

I created a data visualization. The only challenge was that my data is boring. To reflect the sameness of my drink consumption, I chose to graph it using Excel -- a boring approach to data visualization.

Examine Patterns, Interpret, and Reflect: My drinking patterns are quite regular. And there were no surprises for me.

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This is how I collected information about my beverage consumption each day. It was messy, but it worked! You can see some of the grappling I did with various measurements and also with the tricky refills from the restaurant.

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I generally don't worry too much about the type of, and how much, liquids I consume). My regular diet isn't flawlessly healthy, but I do get a portion of my hydration from what I eat (fresh fruit, certain vegetables I snack on, and so forth). The challenge is interesting, however. I decided restrict my tracking to fluids I deliberately consume as such (i.e., things that I drink). And I thought it would be best to go with the simplest collection method I could think of: a small notebook and a pencil. I have been recording the following:

Day and time --each page being for one day, and the times provided by my watch or my computer

What I am drinking

How much I am drinking --based on a variety of standard-sized glasses and water bottles I own

I very quickly realized, however, that despite the advantages of this manual method (no electricity required, easy to carry the little notebook around) it was difficult to make it precise.

Depending on the other activities I was engaged in at the time, I might start drinking something, put it down, and resume drinking later. What was an "accurate" clock time, in that case?

If I happened to grab a glass I did not usually drink from, I would have to stop and measure its volume (using water and a measuring cup) before I could drink anything at all.

If I were tired, distracted, or otherwise preoccupied, I might have to "backfill" my tracking after the fact, or risk missing information altogether.

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I'd love to say I used a sophisticated data visualization program to create this display. That would be lying, however. Instead, I fell back on something much simpler --Microsoft Powerpoint. I feel as if this is, in a sense, a bit of a cop-out. Powerpoint did, however, enable me to produce proportional circles based on the volume of fluids I consumed (diameter of circles = 1/16" x number-of-ounces), arrange them, and resize them to collage together a reasonably effective and attractive visualization that encompassed the simple set of information I wanted to convey.

This visualization has, of course, a number of imperfections --I did not, for example, test my color palette, luminance and contrast ratios to insure that it is accessible to individuals with various kinds of dichromatic vision. This will be an important consideration in any revision of the graphic.

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Whenever I would drink something I would check how many fl oz it could hold and remembered it until I could get to my computer and record it on a spreadsheet.

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Originally, when this question was brought up to us in class, I thought I could take pictures of every time that I drink something and therefore be able to track it that way. Though, this option could work, I myself did not keep up with taking pictures every single time. I included the pictures I was able to get when I filled up my water. So instead I just chose to keep notes of it and then transfer that information into a table.

On a side note, I thought it was quite interesting that the water station also kept track of their own data. How many bottles of water they were filling up