Last year this got mixed with overviews, but the lecture notes are useful.
Different readings this year.
Tangles knot of questions:
- Why do it?
- What does it work?
- What is it good for (or not)
- Why vis instead of X?
- How do we do it?
- How to design it?
- How to realize those designs?
- When is it good?
- What are the different flavors of it? (since these may have different answers to the other questions)
Different perspectives on how to come at these questions
Readings
- Classifications chapter (from Designing Data Vis)
- Kosara: defines vis
- Kosara: names of vis
- Kosara: many word for vis
- Kosara: vis. vs. infographics
- smashing magazine dos and don’ts
- tufte (and maybe the article about him)
- few (the commentary is quite valuable)
a lot of reading (mostly short for 1 day)
Where are these people coming from:
- Tufte: historian (lesser degree, designer)
- Smashing Magazine: designers/artists
- Few: tries to come from all directions (perception, history, practical, design, …)
- Kosara: academic, tries to be far reaching and connect to others
Some key characters (mentioned in Few)
- Playfair
- Bertin – Semiology of Graphics
- Cleveland and McGill – Graphical Perception
- Card, Schneiderman, Mackinlay – early infovis manifestos
Note: interaction is missing from lots of these (especially Tufte and Few)
Few:
- over-simplifies the history
- too hard on pie-charts (he has his particular mission)
- has a clear idea of what is good, which makes the other questions easy for him
- we should always judge a visualization’s merits by the degree to which we can easily, efficiently, accurately, and meaningfully perceive the story that the information has to tell
- (beware: he’s a pundit and is trying to sell his particular style)
- basic perception principles (nice since it mixes gestault with lower levels)
- Rensink (psychologist)
- Robbins (pundit) – why don’t people buy our books (why are there bad vis)
- Kosara (academic vis) – interaction and his recent papers