For online discussions and seek and finds, we are giving you two different evaluations. One is the per-assignment “quantitative” evaluation - this is posted for each assignment, and is on a 1-5 scale. The other is the more “qualitative” feedback, where we look at your work over the course of a few weeks and give you a grade.

This posting explains these two, so you can interpret the scores you are getting.

This week class is very different. As you hopefully already know from a the first post, and the additional details in [Details about IEEE Vis 2020 for Class](/posts/vis-details/), next week is IEEE Vis2020 (VisWeek). And your assignment is to attend the conference.

All class activities are changed to connect to the conference. See [Details about IEEE Vis 2020 for Class](/posts/vis-details/).

• There will be no class meetings (synchronous) - you should attend conference events.
• There are no readings for class - you should watch conference events, and possibly look at papers that interest you.
• Online Discussion 09: Vis Week (due Tue, Oct 27) asks about your experience with the conference.
• Seek and Find 09: Virtual Vis Week (due Fri, Oct 30) asks you to find something at the conference.
• Survey 09: Virtual Vis (due Fri, Oct 30) will ask you about the experience of using the conference as a class activity. It may have some more questions as well (I have some that were supposed to be on a previous survey, but I made a mistake and they were lost).

The following week, we’ll return top our normal form of class with a particularly exciting topics (for me): human perception and its impact on Vis. We’ll have a special guest visitor on Friday. There is a good amount of reading for next week, if you want to get started early, see Readings 10: Perception.

Here are the examples for the 2nd interaction lecture - I wanted to put the links in one place so you can try them yourself! (and I had a place to copy/paste them into the chat)

As part of class, you are required to “attend” some of IEEE Vis2020 (VisWeek). This posting explains what you need to do for class, and provides some advice on how to find things at the conference.

A warning: this is the first virtual IEEE Vis conference. It’s all an experiment. I think they are figuring things out as they go. My advice is based on older conferences.

The virtual conference thing is an experiment. It is an experiment for the conference. It is an experiment for this class. I have no idea how well it will work out. But I think it’s an exciting opportunity. Even if you never look at visualization work again, learning about online conferences and presentations will be useful.

IEEE Vis2020 (VisWeek) is the main academic conference for the field of Visualization. This year, it is October October 25-30.

Normally, I have to scramble to figure out how to cover class during VisWeek. This year, since the conference is virtual (online) and free, I am taking you (my class) with me!

As part of class, you are required to “attend” (participate, at least a little). All normal class activities this week (lectures, online discussion, seek and find, survey) will be connected to VisWeek.

You must register for the conference. Go to the web page and click on the “Vis Registration Virtual Assistant”. Registration is free, but you have to register.

Note: The details are still being worked out because the details of how the conference will operate have not been announced yet. So, I am not making specific recommendations of what you should do, or requirements for class, yet.

I have made a set of videos (like a lecture) about TreeMaps. There are 3, roughly 10 minute videos in the class Kaltura MediaSpace Channel.

Back when we were discussing encodings, I had slides about TreeMaps, but I didn’t get to go through them. My intent was to make them as a video lecture - which I have. I broke it into 3 pieces, and added some discussion of some of the algorithmic details.

TreeMaps are a useful visualization design - they are used a lot for showing part whole relationships, especially with hierarchical data. They are also really useful in understanding part/whole encodings and some of the tradeoffs.

• Part 1 - discusses part whole relationships and the kinds of encoding choices we make.
• Part 2 - talks about some of the details of treemap encodings, and why we use treemaps (and maybe why not).
• Part 3 - gets into more details, including design choices and algorithms.

This week we’ll focus on interaction: it’s something you’ve definitely experienced, but maybe haven’t thought about. We’ll see some common ways of using interaction in visualization, as well as discuss ways to think about interaction. In particular, we’ll consider its costs and benefits.

There is no Design Challenge right now - but there is a design exercise (which has taken over the online discussion).

Looking ahead… Next week is the IEEE Vis Conference, which will “take over” class. Be sure to register (go to the web page and click on the button for the registration “helper” agent). You should expect to do some planning for how you will participate (i.e. pick what you will attend/watch) - however, the schedule isn’t completely posted (as of Oct 15). Expect some guidance and requirements in an upcoming announcement.

Readings 08: Interaction

• Online Discussion 08: Interaction (due Tue, Oct 20) is the The Paris Apartment Problem: A Design Exercise and some thinking about interaction.
• Seek and Find 08: Interaction (due Fri, Oct 23) asks you to look for a good example of interaction.
• Lectures on the 21st and 23rd will combine discussion of the design exercise with “lecture” and discussion about interaction.
• Survey 08: Interaction (due Fri, Oct 23) - these are helping me help you, as well as (hopefully) helping you reflect on the material.

This is another attempt to take a previous in-class design exercise and adapt it for the “work at home” environment of the online class.

The design exercise has two parts: one is to consider how to design glyphs to encode high-dimensional data about restaurants; the second considers how to address a very specific task that involves collections of high dimensional data.

Part 1 of this assignment will be turned in as part of the Tuesday initial posting for Online Discussion 08: Interaction (due Tue, Oct 20). For this part, you will generate a number of glyph designs. We will discuss these in class (probably on Wednesday). Part 2 of the assignment will also be turned in as part of the online discussion for Online Discussion 08: Interaction. In this part, you will develop designs for the “restaurants near a point” problem. We will discuss these solutions in class on Friday.

This week, we’ll continue our discussion of scale, but turn our attention to issues related to having too many dimensions.

At the beginning of the week, we wrap up Design Challenge 1 - you’ll turn in your final report and peer reviews. So you should be expecting Design Challenge 2 to be starting right away…

But (surprise!) I have decided to cancel Design Challenge 2! (if you’re curious what I had in mind, you can see the draft at DC2: Spaghetti Plots). Expect an announcement of what is happening and why - but basically, we’ll do 2 design challenges and take a little more time to make sure we really capture the lessons from them, rather than rushing through 3.

Readings 07: High-Dimensional Data

• Online Discussion 07: High-Dimensional Data (due Tue, Oct 13) is the last part of the Arrivals Exercise and some thinking about dimensionality reduction.
• Seek and Find 07: High-Dimensional Data (due Fri, Oct 16) asks you to look for examples .
• Classes will be pretty typical on Wednesday and Friday.
• Survey 07: High-Dimensional Data (due Fri, Oct 16) - these are helping me help you, as well as (hopefully) helping you reflect on the material.
• And, of course Design Challenge 1 has its last phase due DC1-4: Final Handin (due Mon, Oct 12). Design Challenge 2 has been cancelled. Some of it will be replaced.

As discussed on the Grading page there is a qualitative aspect to discussion grading. While your initial posts are checked to make sure they meet the minimum (those grades you’ve been getting), the quality of your postings and participation counts as part of your discussion grade and your participation grade. We also said we won’t look at individual weeks: we’ll try to take a “holistic” view (since some weeks you may have more to say than others).

A downside of this qualitative holistic aspect is that it is hard to provide you with feedback: both in terms of “real” feedback (to help your learning), and “grading feedback” (so you can make sure you are on track to get the grade you want, if you care about such things). But, we will try to give you some feedback.

One thing we will do is provide quantitative measures of your online discussion performance. We emphasize that these are crude estimates and will really read things in determining grades.

I hesitate to even give you the quantitative metrics, because they don’t tell the whole story, and I do not want to imply that they are what we base grades on. However, I think they can be useful feedback.

This week’s topic is “Too Much Stuff” - what do we do as our data gets big? Scale is a fundamental challenge in visualization. We’ll learn some categories of strategies and how to apply them in our designs. Design Challenge 1 (DC1): One dataset / Four Stories wraps up, and we’re trying to do an “in-class design exercise” as an online, asynchronous activity.

Readings 06: Scale - are unusual because it has you pick some of the readings, and has things that are more of a “doing” than a reading.

• Online Discussion 06: Scale (due Tue, Oct 6) is first parts of the Arrivals Exercise.
• Seek and Find 06: Scale (due Fri, Oct 9) asks you to find visualizations in the wild.
• This week, we’ll have more typical lectures.
• Survey 06: Scale (due Fri, Oct 9) - these are helping me help you, as well as (hopefully) helping you reflect on the material.
• And, of course Design Challenge 1 is ongoing. Last week, DC1-3: Design Handins (due Mon, Oct 5) had you turn in most of your designs. This week DC1-4: Final Handin (due Mon, Oct 12) will ask you to turn in your final documents, and remaining visualizations, and to do peer critiques of some of your classmates’ work.

As an experiment, we will do an “in-class design exercise” as an online discussion (not in lecture time). I described this in class on Friday, October 2nd (see (05-2-Critique-Arrivals.pdf 0.7mb), or you can review the video recording of the lecture).

The goal of this assignment is to get you to integrate thinking of scale and comparison into your visualization design process, and to give you a concrete example to consider the frameworks for comparison and scale. It also is meant to give you practice with a design problem, including discussion and critique around tasks and designs. Design challenge 2 will resemble this exercise.

The specific problem considers lists of arrivals. Two model problems are “when do students arrive in class” and “when are assignments handed in”.

I would like to more actively encourage collaboration in class - especially informal collaboration. This is especially tricky in the remote setting, since some of the best mechanisms for informal collaboration (meeting before after class, running into people in the halls, …) aren’t happening.

There is always a tricky tensions between academic conduct and collaboration. For this class, I want to make the policies encourage collaboration: I trust students to be honest and not abuse collaboration. Collaboration is so valuable, and fragile, that I want to encourage it.

This posting will clarify policies that should help you understand that collaboration is acceptable, and give you some suggestions to encourage it.

Short version: I encourage you to find ways to talk to your classmates to discuss class things (including providing feedback on DC drafts).

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to give individual feedback on Phase 2 of Design Challenge 1. However, here are some common comments on things we saw.

Here are some summaries of Surveys 2-4. These really are giving me some insights on how class is going. I really do read them, and they really do help.

I had read these in a timely fashion, but later realized I never summarized them for you.

And I still “owe” you the video about Treemaps.