The process we used to create the data mural was definitely different from the design meetings I attend weekly on visualization projects in my research. Most projects that we visualize are more data heavy and less illustrative because the points we want to include in particular visualizations often dictated the visual forms and complexity we needed to represent. I think that there is a tendency to focus on the quantity and quality of data in my own design processes rather than starting with small snippets of anecdotes and stories.
I am surprised how well and cleanly the ideas for the murals came together given the short amount of time. I think this is the result of following the data journalism handbook’s points. We translated the looking for key terms step into a real time activity by using post-its and were able to construct a story that is true to the preliminary data quickly. We did not pursue a lot of the other more time consuming tasks, such as going through and curating the data ourselves, which if time allowed I would liked to have done.