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Hating Paper

By Justin Bathon

So, I am dissertating right now (feeling on the downhill slope finally). God it is horrible.

Anyway, I am really hating the strict format. I am so confined in what I can do with information. The medium is so static. I am not a person that likes to read data in black and white on a page. I am a person that likes to see and play with data. I don't want to read in a paragraph that 34% said X, 26% said Y and 40% said Z. I like to see a pie chart in those situations. It gives me a better feel for who is saying what relative to others.

Anyway, thought I would share a little data to illustrate my point of how much more powerful a dynamic medium can be. For my dissertation I am breaking everything down into bits and spitting out 1 bit at a time. That is a great way of creating a couple hundred pages worth of black and white paragraphs (which seems to be the goal), but not a great way of communicating the big picture. If I do get to add a chart, the most variables I can accommodate without causing mass confusion is 2 and maybe 3 if I used 3 dimensional charts

Compare that to this (press play and feel free to click around in it ... it's dynamic)

If you get an error message below, click this link (shows the motion chart in front of the data used to create it).

This is a chart that tracks multiple variables, as many as you want actually. In this case I have 5 variables at play but could easily add more. In this chart I am showing (1) year of licensure, (2) institution of licensure, (3) average attendance rate at all the schools lead by administrators licensed at that institution in the given year, (4) average enrollment rate at all the schools lead by administrators licensed at that institution in the given year, and (5) average free lunch percent at all the schools lead by administrators licensed at that institution in the given year. Plus, this chart animates change over time and let's the user change the variables to whatever combination they desire. Cool, right? Really, cool if you ask me. But, this is not going to be in the dissertation because the form prevents the function. Nor is this going to be in any print journals.

I am reminded of Michael Wesch's Information Revolution.

What is so utterly frustrating is that I have the tools and knowledge to do better than traditional forms of scholarship will allow ... but that tradition is limiting practice. I have to conform my dissertation to the traditional confines even though it comes at the expense of quality.

By the way, case you were wondering, the chart above was created with Google Motion Chart out of Google Docs. If you are not using Google Docs yet, you need to try it.

Full post as published by Edjurist on May 08, 2008 (boomark / email).