Comments on: Which climate factors drive early wine grape harvests?

By: rahulb

rahulb — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 12:53:55 +0000

This is a nice analysis, but this isn’t stitched together into a narrative for this audience well.

Centrality of maps:
Your maps are a reasonable choice for representing the geographic nature of the impact of temperature on harvest date, but are presented without visual context. Your voice explanation provides some of this, but I would have appreciated more explanatory visual design to help understand the two maps of the different time periods.

Rationale for design choices:
You’ve provided strong rationale for why you picked certain factors and time periods. One note is that I wonder why you picked 1980 as the key year to split your analysis.

Layers of reading:
If I look at all the pieces you’ve included I mostly see a detailed, and super-detailed presentation of the data for readers. I don’t see an introduction that pulls me in by setting up some context and then pulling me into a narrative about it.

Appropriate data use:
Your analysis is data-heavy, but your video introduces it well. I won’t dig into an analysis of your correlations, because this course focuses on the story.

Suitability for audience:
Your audience is well defined, giving you solid criteria for making design choices. Your note about providing the multi-variate analysis as an addendum makes sense – this audience won’t be interested in this expect for you to prove your trustworthiness. Showing lots of numbers is certainly one way to do this.

Narrative:
You did a good job citing your sources and other work that inspired your sketch. The key piece I take away here is that temperature is the driving factor here, from your quick analysis. The problem is that you’ve presented this as a research report with suggestions about how they could be introduced to the wine club, rather than a narrative story that walks us through the context, impacts, and relevance of the data.

By: nspendse

nspendse — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 12:15:53 +0000

The analysis was very complete. The plots that you have come up with are really interesting. The maps also look really good. One thing that I’d suggest is to make the map scale more understandable. I couldn’t interpret K just by looking at the map and even after reading that it’s the correlation I don’t fully understand what it is. Maybe a line or two on how it was calculated would be helpful!

By: robertv

robertv — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 05:10:29 +0000

One thing that was great: The initial regression graphs were really on point. Like, they provided a very easy way to convey the fact that temperature influences grape harvest date. This was also a great way to analyze this data.

One thing that may need work: While the above analysis was great, our group also looked at this data. One thing we found was that the date when grapes are harvested are heavily dependent on what type of wines winemakers are looking to make. So, it would have been nice to say a thing or two about whether there might be confounding factors: how much of the change was coming from winemakers choosing to make their wine differently or evolving their wine-making process and not necessarily just temperature?

By: xio1

xio1 — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 01:29:34 +0000

Echoing a previous comment, this is an impressive analysis but you’ve really limited your audience to Amateur Wine Enthusiasts who also have a relatively significant data background. I think if there was more context on what the different effects are, even tying them to specific moments and vintages might help ground the results better in your audience’s mind, making it a more useful advocacy tool.

By: cjc1

cjc1 — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 01:28:07 +0000

I thought your analysis was really well done and does a convincing job telling the story of the effect of climate change on grape harvest date.
One thing I think you could improve is the visual display of your data, given your audience is amateur French wine members. They may not have the technical skills to interpret what exactly is being plotted on your map visualization (i.e. what “K” on the heatmap legend means).

By: ojyao

ojyao — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:10:10 +0000

impressive analysis. one thing that could be improved on is zoning in on making your audience care about the data. if they are wine club members, love wine, and have enough money to be in a wine club, maybe there could be a call to action to contribute to climate action organizations, or some pointers on what types of wine are most resilient to climate change and how to invest their money those regions.