July 15th - July 20th

Week's Plan:
Work with Aaron and find out what sequences we are able to detect.

Write up the alternative directions to research, ie. the tweaked research questions, with methodologies, introductions and expected results.

Friday I'll meet with Dr. B. and discuss the proposed directions for my research.

Week's Accomplishments:
Sunday I worked on combining the work that Aaron did, into the project with the pieces I have done, so that  InVis has all its pieces connected, specifically the sequence detecting components. I also wrote a data-exporter for the InVis project so we can load in the frequencies for the Stoichiometry data into yEd, to look at that data.

Monday I met with Dr. Croy and finished my PhD paper work. We tried a handful of different tweaks in order to detect "better" sequences. We had some success, clearing out less meaningful discoveries, specifically subsets of longer sequences.

I also met with Dr. Wartell to look at the concept of Data / Ink Ratio but it doesn't seem that this is the direction we should go. Though he did provide helpful conversation which lead me to current direction. The Data / Ink Ratio is not so much a testable metric to compare against and measuring insights is not well defined in the field of info-vis. It is more of a comparison, being that Graph A showing some data, and Graph be showing the same data but having a multi-colored background, uses more ink but doesn't add to the value of the graph. Edward Tufte made the argument, in his book - without evidence, that this should be done. Later research papers on the issue showed that with "chart-junk" pretty pictures helped people remember the graphs, though accuracy of the data was not affected.

Tuesday I made some necessary fixes to the data parser, so that we would have more clean data, for both looking at in the tool, and also for performing our sequence detection on. I also continued to work with Aaron to fine tune our algorithm for detecting sequences, and it does find "things" but its hard to say if they are the most interesting or least interesting things.

Wednesday I read Biswas best paper from EDM-12, and was able to draw a decent idea out of it. I also updated my research questions towards questions which will be easier to test and have a greater differentiation between the two. I've written a section in my proposal to reflect this proposed ideas.

Thursday & Friday I worked on reading dealing with the hint and non-hint groups of data from the 2009 semester. So we can display what the two differences between the two groups which is the focus of Stephanie's end of summer report. To do this there were a handful of changes that needed to be made to the program. I also worked with Aaron and Stephanie to help get their reports in order.

Problems:
Making the tabbed pane able to show multiple types of sequences in cohesion with the ExplorerManager of the Netbeans platform is a giant pain in the butt. I'll likely ignore the "proper" solution and just get something that works for the time being.

Next Week's Plan:
Tuesday I will go to Evie's Dissertation Defense.

I need to incorporate some trivial means of incorporating grouping-data into InVis. We often want to look at  the difference between hint groups and non-hint groups. The next would be students that solve the problems versus students that don't solve the problems.

Definitely need to spend some time working on an overview of the states, in an abstract sense. Rather than a graphical overview, re-work the description of state, to have a graph represent the more abstract states that people visit when solving a problem.

Other Pieces of Work:
We should export the frequency data for the stoichiometry data and load that into yEd and see what see.

We should write some type of data loader that lets load in "hint-actions" so we can see where students request hints.

Hours Worked:
Sun - 10
Mon - 7
Tues - 12
Wed - 8
Thurs - 8
Fri - 6
Sat - 0
Total: 51