One last reading. I was tempted to skip it to let you focus on projects, but I think it’s a really important topic.

One Monday, May 7th, we’ll talk about the perception of 3D. We might get to talking about visualizing 3D phenomena, but I am not sure if we’ll get that far. The Piazza posting is optional. But I am curious as to which readings you looked at, and what you think of them.

The readings are:

• Chapter 5 of Visual Thinking for Design (the textbook).
• James Todd. The Visual Perception of 3D Shape. Trends in Cognitive Science. 2004. A nice, compact article.

These are semi-optional – I’d like you to look at them and get a sense. Skim the motivations, look at the pictures.

• Amy and Bruce Gooch. Using Non-Photorealistic Rendering to Communicate Shape. SIGGRAPH ‘99 course notes here. (this is better than the original, but seminal paper. you don’t need to read it in detail – just skim through the motivation and look at the pictures.
• Cipriano and Gleicher. Molecular Surface Abstraction.
• Look at the light collages web page (but it links to the initial version of the paper – if you want to read more, check below).

I really wanted to add a few things that show how to effectively use the cues in visualization. But this is just so huge and broad that I don’t know where to start. I’ll mention some of my favorites (some of these are seminal pieces, where there is lots of follow on. some of these are:

• Lee, et al. Geometry-Dependent Lighting. IEEE Trans of Vis and Comp Graphics. (ieee official version). Note: this paper is the extended version of the original Light Collages paper.
• SIGGRAPH 2008 Course notes “Line Drawings from 3D Models” http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/proj/sg08lines/ – These are nice slides that summarize the topic very well.
• DeCarlo, et al. Suggestive Contours for Conveying Shape. Proc. SIGGRAPH 2003. (pdf) (project). The 2003 paper is really seminal, the web page lists some of the follow-ons.
• Linedemann and Ropinski.  About the Influence of Illumination Models on Image Comprehension in Direct Volume Rendering. IEEE Vis 2011. (page here)

On Monday, April 30, we’ll talk about some of the basic elements of visual design.

To prepare for this, please read:

• Some excerpts from The Non-Designer’s Design Book, by Robin Williams (here)
• Some excepts from Design Basics Index, by Jim Krause (here)

And, (optionally) look through this excerpt from a typography book that explores design principles as they apply to typography.

• Logo, Font & Lettering Bible, by Leslie Carbarga (here)

After the lecture on Monday (but before Wednesday, May 2nd), on the Piazza page, please consider:

Now that you’ve learned about some of the heuristics used by designers to
create and to evaluate designs, how useful do you think these might be
when applied to visualization?

Do you see any parallels to what we’ve already discussed in class?
Does reading about these from the point of view of a designer change
the way that you think about the things that we’ve covered?

In a graduate class, I often try to spend some time on the skills a student should build. One of the biggest is how to give a presentation. This is closely connected to visualization.

There are a few caveats here:

• The goals and standard for presentation really vary across venue/discipline. What we value in computer science (in particular the areas I work in) are quite different than in other disciplines. It’s hard for me to discuss this without value judgement (since I am bred to believe in the “CS way”), but I also plead ignorance to the practices in other area. I’d like to use this as a chance to learn about others.
• I don’t consider myself to be a great presenter. Do as I say, not as I do. The upside of this, is that it means I think about how to be better at it.
• A lecture is not the same as a talk, so what you see in class is quite different than what you would see in one of my talks.
• Even within a particular style/venue/type of talk, there is a wide range of opinions on what is good talk, what the goals should be, …
• The “right answer” depends not only on the situation, but on the person. But that will be one of the biggest lessons I hope you get. I may not speak to your specific case, but hopefully, you can see how the general lessons apply.
• As you might guess, I have strong opinions. But you don’t have to guess at what they are, since I’ve written them down.

Given that…

My real goal is to get you to think about what might make for a good presentation, and to form your own strong opinions – even if they are different than mine.

What I would like everyone to do (before Wednesday, April 25th):

1. Try to think of the best presentation you’ve seen in recent memory. Actually, try to think of three: the best in general, the best in your area, and the one you most aspire to. They might be the same one, or they might be different. Think of this before doing the next things. (and no, you can’t use #2 ). Try to think about what made these presentations so great. Write this down before proceeding to the next steps.
2. If you’ve never seen a presentation by Hans Rosling, watch one. They are easy to find. Here’s one I have handy. If you have seen one already, you probably would like an excuse to watch another one. Although, you just need to watch some presentation online by someone generally considered to be a good presenter.
3. Read through my rant about presentations. This will be a coming attraction for the class discussion. Think of it as a way to load up on rotten tomatoes to throw at me while I rant.
4. (if you are a grad student) Try to find some presentation advice for your discipline. What makes for a good talk in your world? Has anyone written it down? If you can find a pointer to something on the web, that would be valuable for us all!
5. Make a post on Piazza, on this page

The following things are optional:

For the entertainment value of Tufte at his absolute worst, you can read his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.” There is a ton of commentary on this, but I recommend actually seeing the actual essay first. It is available on the protected reader. If you are able to see through Tufte’s rhetoric, there are actually some useful points here. But they are sufficiently hard to extract, that I suggest this on mainly for entertainment value. Finding a level-headed commentary on it might be more valuable (much like in the chart junk debate), but I don’t have one handy. If you find one you think is any good, please post about it.

I am explicitly not asking you to think about slide design – since I think it takes away from the main message. If you want to learn about slide design, there are lots of good books (my current fave is presentationzen design – I just found out that UW has it online! (alt link)). And numerous great websites. If you have a favorite, post about it!

Due Monday, April 23rd

The goal here is to try to understand how animation might help with visualization. However, to get there, I’d like people to learn about the art of animation, to appreciate how it should be done “right.” So yes, we’re going to watch (and read about) cartoons.

You need to read one of the “principles” readings, and the “animated transitions” (Heer) reading (at the bottom). The cutting article at the bottom is actually for the next assignment, but I include it here in case you want to read ahead.

The classic reference for the Principles of Animation is “The Illusion of Life” – a book about the history of Disney animation. It’s a coffee table art book – not necessarily something meant for either animators or computer scientists to learn from. But it is fabulous, and full of great examples from classic Disney films:

• Johnson and Thomas. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Several editions (Aberville Press, 1981 is the “original” I think). Chapter 3:The Principles of Animation. (26MB download)

Because so many artists wanted this book, it has been reprinted many times (I own 3 different reprints). Curiously, one of the editions is more focused on teaching artists. In this version, Chapter 1 is the principles (very similar to Ch3 in the original). The preface is a good introduction to animation pre-“Principles” (which is good for understanding them). And Chapter 2 is a great summary of how they made the movies (irrelevant for class).

• Preface – Early Animation (useful since you might realize why Computer Animation when done wrong is more like this than the good stuff in the next chapter)
• Chapter One – Principles of Animation (very similar to Chapter 3 above, but maybe a little more focused – this is the recommendation if you are going to pick one – warning, 44Mb)
• Chapter Two – Production (irrelevant for class, but fun and nice to look at – warning, 115Mb)

John Lasseter was a Disney animator who went to work with a small company of graphics hackers. The company grew and grew and grew and now everyone knows Pixar. His SIGGRAPH 1987 paper was a seminal work where he introduced the graphics world to the principles of animation. The basic content is the same as the Johnson and Thomas chapter, but its more condensed, and the examples are from Pixar films.

• John Lasseter. Principles of traditional animation applied to 3D computer animation. SIGGRAPH 1987. (acm site with PDF). Note, there are many summaries of this paper on the web. Here’s one by a well-known animator. But do read the original. (well, you’re even better off reading a Disney thing first, then reading this for historical context – if you’re interested ).

Now, you might wonder “what does this have to do with visualization.” One answer (and this is only one of several) can be seen in:

• Jeffery Heer and George Robertson. Animated Transitions in Statistical Data Graphics. InfoVis 2007. (project page – I strongly recommend watching the movie as it is well done. you might not even need to read the paper)

Note that this whole discussion is mainly relevant to ADDING motion to things, not necessarily visualizing motion. (in which case exageration and staging would be distortions). To get you thinking about showing motion, we’ll think about the opposite problem of animation:

• Cutting, J. E. (2002). Representing motion in a static image: constraints and parallels in art, science, and popular culture. Perception, 31(10), 1165-93. (online)

For Monday, April 23rd, you must read (at least) one of the Johnson and Thomas Chapters and the Heer paper. On the Piazza page (coming soon) (thanks Robert!) give your thoughts, both on the art of animation, as well as its relationship to visualization. Think about how the animation principles might be useful in presenting information – beyond just the examples of Heer&Robertson. The Cutting reading will be required as a separate assignment (but you might want to read ahead)

(this reading was supposed to be due on Monday, April 16th, but since it was announced late, we’ll consider things posted before Wednesday, April 18th as on time)

To be clear here, we mean graph in the Computer Science sense (e.g. networks or relations between nodes) rather than the basic math (e.g. bar graph)

This is a whole big topic on its own. The reading range from basic overviews of the different ways to present information, to geeky details of how to implement various methods, to specific designs for different problems.

Here is a rather intimidating survey. Read it to get a sense of what the basic methods are – don’t try to get at all the details and subproblems and … Everyone should read this one (or at least skim through it).

• von Landesberger, T., Kuijper, A., Schreck, T., Kohlhammer, J., van Wijk, J. J., Fekete, J.-D., & Fellner, D. W. (2011). Visual Analysis of Large Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Future Research Challenges. Computer Graphics Forum, 30(6), no-no. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01898.x (official version) (authors’s copy)

This survey is over a decade old, but gets some of the key ideas across better than the newer ones:

• Herman, I., Melancon, G., & Marshall, M. S. (2000). Graph visualization and navigation in information visualization: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 6(1), 24-43. doi:10.1109/2945.841119 (official IEE Version) (author’s version)

To get a sense of the ways people have thought about showing trees, check out:

• treevis.net – A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization 2.0 *beta* by Hans-Jörg Schulz

This one is specific to Trees. With a focus on how to compare them. However, it’s really nice for getting a sense of the variety of ways to present this kind of information:

• Graham, M., & Kennedy, J. (2009). A survey of multiple tree visualisation. Information Visualization, 9(4), 235-252. doi:10.1057/ivs.2009.29 (as IVS sample paper) (official page)

Here’s a video of a Tamara Munzner Talk that I like since it shows the diversity of options. I don’t necessarily like sitting through the whole hour.

• 15 Views of a Node-Link Graph: An InfoVis Portfolio google06:Google TechTalks, Mountain View CA, 6/06 Talk video (Google video format) (slides)

Here are some specific papers that discuss things of specific interest:

• “Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data” (download PDF)
  Danny Holten, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG; Proceedings of Vis/InfoVis 2006), Vol. 12, No. 5, Pages 741 – 748, 2006.
  (many people commented about this feature in MizBee)
• Scalable, Versatile and Simple Constrained Graph Layout. Tim Dwyer. EuroVis 2009. (pdf)
  (this is required for Jeff Heer’s course, it’s a modern take on graph layout. the method gives a sense of the evolution and all the methods that came before it)

For Monday, April 16th, you need to have skimmed through #1 (von Landesberger) and at least looked at some of the pictures in #2 (Herman). You need to either read (skimming to get the main ideas) of #3 (Graham) or watched Munzner #4. If you’re an 838 student, you must read 5 or 6 (Holten or Dwyer). You are welcome to read more.

You also need to look at TreeVis.net. Mainly to get a sense of the diversity.

You should comment on Piazza. People generally think of good things to say, but you might want to comment on the diversity of ways to show network information. Be sure to list the things that you’ve read.

For Monday, April 9th

As a “review” of all (well, many) of the concepts that we covered in the first part of the class, we’ll consider some case studies of a specific application: genetic sequence alignment visualization. These papers are nice because they apply a lot of the concepts to an important problem.

The readings are:

• Albers, Dewey and Gleicher. Sequence Surveyor: Scalable Multiple Sequence Alignment Overview Visualization. InfoVis 2011. (paper page here)
• Meyer, M, T Munzner, and H Pfister. “MizBee: A Multiscale Synteny Browser.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 15, no. 6 (2009): 897–904 (author’s version).

On the Piazza page, comment on these readings.

The question of how these might connect to what we’ve learned so far is the subject of an assignment.

For class Monday, March 26th we’ll talk about interaction.

The readings are:

• “Interaction Principles” – Chapter 4 of Munzner’s book. (chapter here, or you know where to find the whole book).
• Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis – by Heer and Shneiderman. (online version here)

These are both more surveys – “zoos” of techniques, many of which you’ve seen but not realized that there are names for. Having names, and seeing the relationships between them is quite useful.

Please discuss on the Piazza page for reading 16. If you need something to think about, consider the pros and cons of using interaction as a tool for addressing visualization issues.

I am changing the syllabus a bit: to give people more time to think about projects (including me), we’ll postpone discussing graphs and networks and take more of our time with dealing with “too much stuff.”

The readings for this week (March 19-23) are Chapters 7 and 8 of Tamara Munzner’s book. (chapter 7) (chapter 8)

These just scratch the surface of some important topics (like Principal Components Analysis). But, rather than giving you more readings, I would prefer that you have more time for working on your project.

There’s a Piazza page for discussion, so comment on the readings. One thing to consider: what would you like to have read more about? What things did we discuss in class that you would have preferred to hear more about? What of the ideas in the readings/lecture did you think were particularly cool and interesting?

You might want to make more than one posting (one before class Monday about the readings, one after class Monday about the lectures, one after class Wednesday about all the lectures. The earlier postings are useful for me to plan lectures.

(due Wednesday, March 14 – enough before class that I can look over the responses)

This reading is meant to give you a sense of some of the ways people try to present high-dimensional data.

You should (quickly) read this old paper:

• Wong and Begerton. 30 years of Multidimensional Multivariate Visualization (find it here). 1997

This paper is archaic – but I want you to see it to get a sense of the “zoo” of not-so-great ideas – many of which did not stand the test of time. Here’s another old survey, mainly useful as a gallery of methods.

• “High-Dimensional Visualizations,” G. Grinstein, M. Trutschl, U. Cvek, 7^th Data Mining Conference-KDD 2001, San Francisco, California, 2001. [PDF]

You should look over both papers to get a sense of the kinds of methods that have been developed over the years.

Two particularly important techniques are scatterplot matrices and parallel coordinates displays. These are so common, there’s no real reading for them but…

For scatterplot matrices, check out the scatterdice system. (project page) rather than reading the paper, you can watch the video.

For parallel coordinates… I want you to find an example of them on the web. Preferably one that offers some degree of interaction (since that’s one of the key ways to address their issues). In your Piazza post, tell us where you found one.

If you’re curious about parallel coordinates, this paper provides a generalization to “non-parallel” coordinates

• Claessen JHT, van Wijk JJ. Flexible Linked Axes for multivariate data visualization. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics. 2011;17(12):2310-6. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22034351. Accessed March 9, 2012. (this reading is optional for class)

On the Piazza page, give your thoughts on the various methods you’ve seen.

To get you thinking about displaying multiple dimensions simultaneously, please read:

• Colin Ware, “Quantitative Texton Sequences for Legible Bivariate Maps,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1523-1530, Nov./Dec. 2009, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2009.175  (ieee page, colin’s version)

For more on bi-variate displays, you can read some of the other suggestions from the previous course offering. These readings are optional.

To work up to multi-variate displays, I’d like you to read:

• Multi-View Methods. Chapter 6 of Tamara Munzner. Information Visualization: Principles, Methods, and Practice. To be published. (chapter here) (whole book on her website)

Less directly connected to the conversation about bi-variate displays, but it will prove useful over the next few weeks.

On Piazza, please comment on how things we’ve read (including this Ware reading) connect to the challenges of multi-variate displays.