Ledger 6 - Data modeling, digitization and augmented reality ?

The more and more I dig into data visualization, data markup, data modeling etc. the deeper the rabbit hole seems to go. Data anything in the sciences seems a bit more straightforward, but practicing these methods in the humanities sort of introduces an issue. 

We play with our data a bit more and a lot of our explorations and research interests are hard to sum up as concrete, useful data for others. When thinking about pedagogy, language analysis is one of the only things we use to defend ourselves and our practices. In visualizing and studying the language improvement data from our students as reflected in grade increase or comprehension increase, we're able to see if they're actually improving and applying. 

And even then, when these findings are presented, they're challenging to understand and nearly mean nothing without deep explanation. I wonder how data visualization and our methods of collection will change as we continue to digitize our methods.

We discussed the issue of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in class recently (which is that handwriting is so variable it's hard to really record automatically...though the machine in Mr. Penumbra's 24 hr Bookstore seems to do that). Without being able to swallow/organize/contextualize all kinds of written text, it poses an accessibility and volume problem. 

Verbal based software is a bit better, but there aren't too many instances of verbal comprehension (sort of like the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests) where we can test our students language/discussions against what we'd hope to teach them. 

We know from numerous studies that visualizing is really good for students, especially when it comes to really "seeing" their success. in writing, too often than not, they base their success and progress on the grade (partly our fault as well for having to grade on something so difficult to grade). Augmented reality has been offering a number of visualizations but few or none that I could find, help to visualize or interact with language as focus. 

Just a suggestion, but how cool would it be to have an augmented reality-based assessment in which 3 or 4 times throughout the semester, we host a discussion in which the language is visualized for the students in real time. Sentences and such floating around in space, grabbable, savable, manipulatable etc. 

The firs round would be a base discussion, perhaps talk about, "what is good writing?". By the 4th time, we would be able to really SEE how their language has improved. How their comprehension of discussion has improved, etc. 

Just being able to see these things I think would be helpful in morale, motivation and comprehension of the goals and themes we hope to invoke in class.