Response 1: On the Importance of Context for Visual Communication

Overview - FINAL

Response 1 is an open-ended short essay style assignment that invites you to reflect on the importance of context for computational text analysis and the potential pitfalls of visualization-based interpretation for the corpus you chose. It asks you to use the visualizations that you generated in both R and Voyant Tools.

• Format: Individual (maximum 1 person)
• Length: Approximately 750 words, plus visuals (screenshots from LLM chat, prompts)
• Due Date: Sunday, 15 March 2026, 11:59pm

Three Main Elements

This response has three core components:

1. Going back to your visuals: For the purposes of Assignment 1, you generated a few visuals, some of which you may not have included in the final draft. You will need to assemble these. You can also use any of the visuals that we generated in the notebooks in class or that appeared in one of the readings.
2. Interacting with the LLM(s) of your choice: Use any LLM of your choice and in any language of your choice. Gemini is an obvious choice, since we have an institutional subscription, but you can also try one you have never used before (say, Mistral Le Chat, Perplexity AI, JAIS or Claude Anthropic).
3. Thinking and Interpreting the Results: Include selective prompts you used in asking about the visuals. Otherwise, you can structure the short response however you like.

Reference at least one (1) other readings or resources (podcasts, articles) from this course in your essay, particularly on the importance of context or visual communication. You may also draw on external sources as appropriate. Be sure to cite what you use, including LLMs. This additional one about misleading visualization might also be interesting.

Steps:

Give the visuals to the LLM of your choice, starting with no context. Prompt the LLM to explain the visuals, then interpret the visuals. Iteratively ask the LLMs more information, collect that information. Discuss it.

Guiding Questions

As you write, consider (but don’t feel obligated to answer) all of these questions:

• Do visuals speak on their own?
• If you looked at visuals created by a fellow student in their paper or lab report, how would you make sense of it?
• Without context, what does an LLM say about your visuals?
• What kind of prompts or added information help obtain a more meaningful result?
• Are there literacies or cognitive contexts that are required for visual communication to be successful?
• What kind of context is required for a visual to be understood by someone else? or a non-human?
• What makes any particular visual one worth including in writing?
• How do we contextualize our arguments by explaining visuals?
• Could you imagine using this process to make your writing with visuals better?

Assessment

Your work will be assessed according to the following criteria located here:

Tips for Success

Writing: Use tools like Markdown Live Preview and Hemingway App to refine your prose for clarity and legibility. Keep the F-shape principle for web writing in mind—readers scan top-to-bottom and left-to-right, so structure your argument visibly.

Publishing: Post your assignment to your course site as a post so instructors and classmates can read and engage with your work.

It is fine to publish your assignment iteratively, but when you finish the final version of your assignment, write at the bottom of it “READY FOR GRADING”.

Good luck with your response!