This document describes a study pod of five students that will pick some topic or focus and will examine and critique three data visualizations on that topic. The pods component of the course will give you an opportunity to meet and know some of your classmates better, and it will give you practice critiquing visualizations.

The primary purpose of the pod is to find interesting, thoughtful, and or provocative visualizations on your topic and to write a short discussion report about each of them. Your report should critique the visualization, point out strengths and weakesses, and discuss your group's ultimate feelings about it. Discuss what works will within the visualization and what might be problematic. You will do this once for three different visualizations on your topic, one per each 2-week phase of the pods time window. Reports should be about 3 or 4 paragraphs long.

Within Canvas, there will be a link to a spreadsheet containing 15 different themes/topics (e.g., environment, sports, health finance, etc.). Students will form a pod of five to study one of these topics. Each pod will contain a leader, a scribe, and three members to find visualizations (corporal, admiral and sergeant). More specifically, responsibilities are:

• Leader - Email your pod, do an e-introduction and coordinate schedules and meetings.
• Scribe - Collect some screenshots of each visualization, bullet points of observations and cool characteristics of the visualization, and the link to the site/vis. Coordinate generating the discussion article and post it to Canvas.
• Corporal, Admiral and Sergeant - Find an interesting visualization.

Expectation: For each of the three visualizations, the "searcher" should find an interesting visualization ahead of time. The Leader then schedules a one-hour meeting of the pod in which the group discusses the visualization (with the Scribe taking notes). Finally, the group together writes the report.

Due dates for the three visualization discussion reports are Feb. 17, Mar. 3, and Mar. 17 at 8pm each day. Teams should use the Canvas discussion capability to create their reports.