Tutorials these are written “documents” that were originally created for my class, or that don’t have the stylized form of the Snacks. They tend to be longer.
This tutorial gives you a sense of my thoughts on Visualization. I define visualization broadly and use this definition to explore the basic concepts. By defining visualization in a clear and operational manner, we can better organize our thinking about what it means to do visualization well (which is our goal), how we should go about doing it, and what we need to learn to do it.
Read more…This tutorial argues for thinking about visualizations in terms of a set of building blocks, rather than the conventional approach of chart types and rules.
Read more…A surprising amount of visualization design and analysis can be wrapped up in the single question “What does this visualization make easy to see?”
Read more…Critique is the practice of examining something carefully to understand it and learn, often in a “discussion” format. Critique is a key tool in learning about Vis, and in improving design (for Vis, and in general). It is also a generally useful skill that can be learned with practice.
Read more…The vocabulary for describing data abstractly defined concisely. These are the terms that come up most often in describing data for visualization.
Read more…Task abstraction is how we discuss what the visualization is trying to help the viewer do. Typically, this is done by trying to organize the range of tasks into categories or a taxonomy.
Read more…This is a tutorial on how to get started with Tableau. It is targeted for CS765 students (but should be OK for anyone). I am using the Census Data set I used in my 2024 Class. The tutorial will walk you through what I did to make a few initial pictures. This will show you some of the quirks of Tableau, and the dataset.
Read more…A quick walkthrough of showing how to get started with Tableau. The data set is one we will use in CS765 Fall 2025: Life expectancy data from around the world. I won’t get as far as making “good” visualizations - but it will give you some hints on how to get started with the data set, and with Tableau.
Read more…