Week 4

Christian Swinehart |
  • Retinal Variable wrap-up
    • Meet in small groups, presenting your data-to-retinal variable ‘mappings’ to one another
    • Pick one example row from the other person’s worksheet that you feel is particularly successful, surprising, or creative
    • Pick one row from your worksheet that you’re unsure of and have a question about
    • Present those two rows when we re-join the whole class
  • Discussion of the Kieran Healy intro chapter
  • Nothing but a Number: Review of your quantitative, qualitative, and humanistic posters
  • Workshop: Git, the course repository, and committing changes
    • Create a ‘fork’ of the course repository on GitHub: click on the Fork icon in the upper right to create a personal ‘working copy’ that you can edit
    • This will take you to a page whose URL is https://github.com/YOURNAME/di-2021; this is the copy you’ll want to work on throughout the semester
    • Click the green button that reads ‘clone or download’ and choose the ‘open in desktop’ option; this will open the Github Desktop app and let you choose a location on your laptop for the files
    • The Repository menu in the Github Desktop app lets you open the folder in the Finder or in Terminal—do the latter and you should be able to see the top-level contents by typing ls and see where it lives on your hard drive by typing pwd
    • Type make config into the terminal window; you’ll only have to do this this one time, but it sets up your local copy’s connection to my master copy
    • In the future I’ll ask you to type make update to pull down changes I’ve uploaded. Try this now and hopefully you’ll see a message saying you're up-to-date
    • Type make server to start a local webserver and navigate in the browser to the 2.mapping-time folder. Try poking around in the basics and examples folders and make sure they run correctly. Note that the terminal window where you typed this will start logging the pages you load. When you’re done working, type Control-C in the terminal window to shut down the server.
    • Copy your work from the first project (ideally as PDFs) into the proper subdirectories of the 1.single-numbers folder then switch to the Github Desktop app and notice that it’s now listing everything you just copied as 'changed files'
    • Type a message into the field in the bottom left corner that says ‘Summary (required)’ then click the blue Commit button
    • Edit the README.md files in each folder itemize the subject(s) and retinal variables you used in the various posters. Try using Markdown syntax to style your text, add links, etc.
    • Once you’re done editing, go back to the Github Desktop app and commit those changes too
  • Tutorial:

Assignment

  • Read the P5.js introductory materials: Getting Started, the Overview, and Color (and take a peek at the Examples section while you're at it).
  • Begin Exercise #2: Right Twice a Day
    • Complete at least three representations of the current wall-clock time (ignore days, weeks, moons, etc. for now) and document your ideas with text and sketches in the process folder
    • Each of these should consist of a pencil sketch or vector drawing and an explanation of how each value (hour, minute, or second) is being transformed into a particular retinal variable (or a combination of them)
    • For each of your three approaches, sketch out what it would look like for the following times:
      • 1:15 A.M.
      • 1:15 P.M
      • 7:45 P.M.
    • Explain the logic of each of the sketches in the process/README.md file
    • Extra credit: Take an initial swing at implementing one of your sketches using P5. Duplicate the template project folder and give it a working title. Then start messing around with its sketch.js file, incorporating what you’ve learned from the tutorials and the demos in the 2.mapping-time/examples folder from the repo.
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