This is a bit more practical aspect of the perception stuff: how to we use marks on the page to encode data. Note: we’re saving color for next week.
Make sure you’ve done the last reading (Munzner Chapter 3).
This time there are 3 different things to read:
First, you need to read a Chapter of Munzner where she (as usual) gives us a nice survey of many of the kinds of things you may want to do.
- Single View Methods. Chapter 5 of Tamara Munzner. Information Visualization: Principles, Methods, and Practice. To be published. (chapter here) (whole book on her website)
Second, you need to read one of the papers by Cleveland and McGill where they first started to empirically assess encodings in a rigorous way. This has exploded into a whole area unto itself, but their first works are not only seminal, but also still relevant and interesting. There are two versions: a long one and a short one. The short one is nice since it is a summary of the long one, pitched to a general audience to make use of the ideas. The long one is nice since it has more detail (especially about their experimental methodology), and a lot more examples. I strongly recommend the long one.
- (short) Cleveland and McGill. Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data. Science 229(4716), 1985. (online library)
- (long) Cleveland and McGill. Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. Journal of the American Statistician, 79(387) 1984. (online library)
Third, you need to read a recent paper that shows there is still on-going work in this area. I have chosen this paper because it’s such a subtle point (the aspect ratio of your graph) that you may not realize what a big difference it makes: even though it matters even for the simple line graphs you probably make all the time.
- Justin Talbot, John Gerth, Pat Hanrahan. Arc Length-based Aspect Ratio Selection. IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2011 (PDF) (doi)
For these readings, I would like you to comment (before class) on the Piazza page, giving some over-all themes you’ve taken away from these 3 readings. You seem to think of interesting things to say without much prompting.