Reading 4: Evaluation

February 4, 2010

in Assignments

(reading due Tuesday, February 9th – please post comments before 7am)

One big question we’ll need to ask with anything we do with visualization is: is it any good?

There are many different ways to assess this. In fact, you can ask this question from the different perspectives on visualization (domain science, visualization/CS science, design). I’ve chosen 3 readings that come at evaluation from these different directions:

  • Tamara Munzner. A Nested Model for Visualization Design and Validation. Infovis 2009 (project page with pdf)

Of course, we can’t talk about “what is good” without consulting Tufte for his strong opinions. (not that he isn’t going to make his opinions clear). This “chapter” is kindof split into one on good and one on bad.

  • Edward Tufte. The Fundamental Principles of Analytical Design. in Beautiful Evidence. (protected pdf). In hindsight, this Tufte chapter is actually much better in the “how” to make a good visualization, and trying to distill the general principles, than many of the others we’ve read. But its Tufte, so its still full of his opinions on “what is good.”
  • Edward Tufte. Corruption in Evidence Presentations. in Beautiful Evidence. (protected pdf)

Finally, Chris North at Virginia Tech has been doing some very interesting work on trying to quantify how much “insight” visualizations generate. I recommend reading the actual journal article with the details of the experiments, but the short magazine article might be a good enough taste of the ideas. (Update: I actually recommend reading the shorter “Visualization Viewpoints” article, since it gives a better overview of the basic ideas. If you’re interested, you can go read the longer journal article that details a specific experiment.)

  • Purvi Saraiya, Chris North, Karen Duca, “An Insight-based Methodology for Evaluating Bioinformatics Visualizations”, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 11(4): 443-456, (July 2005). [pdf]
  • Chris North, “Visualization Viewpoints: Toward Measuring Visualization Insight”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 26(3): 6-9, May/June 2006. [pdf]

Everyone should read all 3 of these. (well, at least 1 chapter of Tufte and at least one of the Chris North papers).

In the comments, share your thoughts on how these different ways to look at evaluation (well, Munzner actually gives several – but I am lumping them together) might relate and help you think about creating visualizations and/or visualization research yourself. What do you think is important for your perspective (e.g. your domain)?

If you have experience in another domain where there are ideas of how things are evaluated, how might these ideas relate to how visualization is evaluated?

Everyone in class must contribute at least one “top level” comment answering the questions above, and preferably add some replies to others to “start up” the class conversation on evaluation.

Two books about vis

February 2, 2010

in Cool Stuff,Student Posts

These seem like great additions to anyone’s library.

Programming the Semantic Web

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions

More at the author’s blog at http://blog.kiwitobes.com/

2011 US Proposed Budget

February 1, 2010

in Cool Stuff,Student Posts

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

A classy way to see where $3.7 trillion is going to go, and how it’ll be different from this year.

Reading 3b: Thinking Differently: Line Drive

February 1, 2010

in Assignments

(due Thursday, Feburary 4th – for discussion in class. for reasons i do not understand, this posting didn’t work the first time, so I had to redo it)

This is a classic paper – but I want you to read it to inspire you to “think differently.” This paper is a great example of how you can take a problem with an “obvious” answer, and come up with something different.

When reading it, consider how their solution to showing a route breaks some of the “assumptions” we have about maps.

  • Manessh Agarwalla and Chris Stolte. Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization. SIGGRAPH 2001. (pdf) (project page) (acm dl)

Think about the domain that you work in – what kinds of assumptions do people make that might be re-assessed to come up with new visualization? What other examples can you think of where challenging typical assumptions can lead to something interesting?

Everyone should comment on what kinds of assumptions can be challenged in visualizations. In class we’ll discuss how to use this to design novel visualizations.

This paper will also come up again when we talk about abstraction and generalization.

If you’re interested, here’s another (optional) paper with an even more non-standard approach to a similar problem:

Before class, comment on the paper (or papers if you read both), as well as to comment on challenging assumptions.

Snowboarding Video

February 1, 2010

in Cool Stuff

The New York Times, a great source of well-done visualizations, has made a video explaining how the half-pipe works. Within the video, there is a combination of 2D and 3D visualizations that try to help explain what is going on. It is interesting to see how they seamlessly move between video, 3D animation, and 2D visualizations – and to think about why the choose the different styles to make different points.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/olympics/olympics-interactives.html#tab0

This week in 838 (Feb 1-5)

January 28, 2010

in News

For the first week in February, we’ll have another general lecture, as well as trying to use a specific example to spur our thinking.

  • On Tuesday, Feb 2, there are readings (see here) on “Why Visualization” from several perspectives. There’s a fair amount of reading, but it should be discussion provoking.
  • On Thursday, Feb 4, we’ll look at 1 or 2 papers (see here) to provoke a conversation on how to come up with creative ideas for visualization. (this link doesn’t seem to appear, even though it was “scheduled” to show up 5 minutes ago).

We’re still in reading mode. I am hoping we’ll do some “try it at home” assignments soon.

Reading 3: Why Visualization?

January 28, 2010

in Assignments

(due Tuesday, Feb 2)

Again, I’d like you to read 3 things to give you 3 different perspectives on the matter.

  1. Chapter 9 of Visual Thinking (the textbook) by Colin Ware. Yes, we’re reading the last chapter first. You might want to skim through the book leading up to it (I basically read qucikly) it in one sitting. Reading the ending might motivate you to read the whole thing (which we will later). The perspective here is how the perceptual science might suggest why vis is interesting.
  2. Chapter 2 of Tufte’s Visual Explanations (pages 26-53). The perspective here is historical – what can happen when Visualizations work or fail. A scan of the capter is here, and hopefully you remember how to access the protected course reader.
  3. The paper: J.-D. Fekete, J.J. van Wijk, J.T. Stasko, C. North,  The Value of Information Visualization.
     In: A. Kerren, J.T. Stasko, J.-D. Fekete, C. North (eds.), Information Visualization – Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives. LNCS 4950, Springer, p. 1-18, 2008. Which is here.

Originally, I was going to assign a different 3rd paper (which I still rcommend, if you want to read an optional 4th paper):  “Views on Visualization” by Jack van Wijk.   There’s a copy here. This is an extended version of his best-paper-ward winning “Value of Visualization” paper (which is here).

Please read these things and post some comments about what you think of them. We’ll discuss them in class through the week.

Notes from 1/28 – Why Vis?

January 28, 2010

in Lecture Stuff

The main conversation was about the papers that people were intrigued by.

For the “what does vis do for you part”, I was working from the notes:2010-01-28-whatvisdoes

Other people’s notes:

nakho’s notes: 01-28-nakho

More on the assignment for Jan 28 (assignment 3)

January 27, 2010

in News

I have added some more links on how to actually find Vis papers on the link for Assignment 3. Unfortunately, the set of things that is complete and official (the IEEE digital library) is not convenient, and the things that are convenient are not complete.

How the web page works

January 26, 2010

in BasicInfo,News

This is coming up enough that it deserves a little discussion…

My experiment in how to set up the course web is having a few problems – people aren’t finding stuff, can’t figure out how to do some things, … The design is flawed. I’m the first to admit it.

Some of this is we (staff and students) just need to get over the initial learning hurdle. Some of it is we need to make a few tweaks in order for things to be less confusing. And finally, some larger improvements to the design (and potentially a total redesign) need to be done. At a deep level, I’m trying to use blogging software to be a course management system – its not clear that this is a good idea.

However, in the short term, I want to focus on getting the course content better organized – and see how things stabilize, and what happens after people get used to the quirky system. So no major redesigns. To make things go more smoothly:

  1. If you haven’t already done so, read the post on how wordpress is setup for this class.
  2. A lot of the issues are related to first-time startup (the first time you make a post, the first time you have to find a reading). Now that you’ve done it, it should be easier.
  3. Understand the difference between a posting and a comment. For readings, you’ll be asked to make comments on the reading posting. For assignments, you will (usually) be asked to make postings. I will try to be clearer.
  4. I have tried to make assignments (things that you do) and readings (things that read and comment on) distinct. Except for readings/assignment 1 which was both. I’m not sure this distinction is important: so I’m going to (try to) merge the categories from now on.
  5. In the “this week in 838” posting, i’ll include links to the things you will do.
  6. If someone finds a way to add links to the google calendar, please let me know.
  7. I am going to map out the assignments/reading/class content more than a week ahead of time (famous last words). This should make it easier for you to see what’s coming, so you don’t need to find everything for the first time at the last minute.

Thanks for your patience – this is all a big experiment, and so far, it seems to be going OK.

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