This week my main focus was setting up my environment (Overleaf, GitHub, Server, etc.), and continuing to write the IRB supplemental documents to send them for review. I had a starting meeting with my mentor, Dr. Battle, to better outline my goals and weekly tasks. We decided on having 2 meetings a week (Tuesday/Thursday), while my weekly tasks (in addition to my longer-term goals) will include conducting a literature search, reading 2 articles a week and summarizing them, and writing/iterating on a section of the final article of this study. I learned a bit more about how the experiment will be conducted, and we finalized on the 3 tools and surveys that we will be using for the experiment (Voyager, Jupyter, and Google Sheets). I’m excited to learn a bit more about Voyager, as it is a tool that I’m not particularly as familiar with compared to the rest of the tools we will be using. During this week, I also go a chance to get a better look at some of the other papers from the lab like the lab’s Vis Ex-Machina paper.

This week I read Defining insight for visual analytics by Chang and their colleagues, and wrote a summary of their findings. Their paper is pivotal to our research as their claim is that insight can be defined as in to different ways, the first definition being a moment of enlightenment, and the second being an advancement in knowledge or a piece of information. The neuroscience community discusses insights as if they can be tangibly attained substance, while the visualization community discusses insights as a type of measurement or goal. This has allowed the basis for us to use insights as a measurement in our experiment.