The original class assignments and grading page was written before I knew I had TA support, before I knew how many people were in the class, before I had any idea of how Piazza would work out, …

It also wasn’t very concrete. Here is an attempt to clarify expectations.

Grading

Grading will be arbitrary and subjective and totally at the instructor’s discretion. It may involve randomness.

More seriously: a lot of the grading of this class is subjective. I put some of the responsibility on you as a student to convince me that you have learned the material, rather than on me for designing fair and diagnostic assessment procedures.

What we will have:

1. Two 5 week projects. These will be letter graded.
2. There will be four “seek and find” assignments. (these will be graded “none, unaccaptable, acceptable, notable”)
3. There will be two design challenges (with redesign)
   1. The initial designs will be graded “none, unaccaptable, acceptable, notable”
   2. The discussion phase will be graded check/nocheck (we’ll count posts)
   3. The final phase will be letter graded
4. There will be readings – some with required Piazza writing, and some without. The required postings will be scored (“none, unaccaptable, acceptable, notable”)
5. There will be class and community – both lectures and online discussion to participate in. (these will be scored “none, unaccaptable, acceptable, notable”)

The “objective measures” for subjective things are weak proxies for what I really want to measure:

• Are you learning the messages in the lecture?
• Are you doing (and learning from) the readings?
• Are you participating in the class as a community (both to learn from your peers and help them learn)?

What will will measure:

• Did you make the required postings (with more than a minimal post) (automatic counting)?
• Did you make more than the required postings (automatic counting)?
• Did you make notable online contributions (subjective spot checking)?
• Are you “there” for class (occassional attendance taking, and subjective sampling)? Note that hiding in the back might be as bad as night being there. “I think you’ve been all the time there but I am not sure what your voice sounds like” is probably worse than “I really notice when you’re not there.”

Implicit in this is the expectations: you will do the required postings, and contribute to online conversation. You will contribute to class. We will allow for the possibility that you can make up for one without the other.

For an explicit grading scheme:

• The 2 projects and assignments (collectively) each count for roughly 1/3 of your grade.
• Rather than viewing assignments and readings as a percentage, they are more of an adjustment/requirement. We adjust your grade by a half letter grade away for each.
• For an 838 student, to get an A, we expect that at least one of readings or participation will be better than just acceptable, and that neither is unacceptable. If you get As on all 3 graded parts, you need to do well enough on the more subjective parts to get an A for a final grade.
• For a 638 student, to get an A, we expect that on average, readings and participation should be acceptable. You will get “bonuses” for doing better. If you get Bs on the graded parts, but really excel in participation and reading, you might get an A.

Probably the best textbook for this class hasn’t been published yet. And it might be the best because since it’s not yet finished, we can hope any flaws it has will get fixed.

Tamara Munzner has been working on this book for a while. She is making a draft available to us.

Tamara Munzner. Information Visualization: Principles, Methods, and Practice. To be published (draft of 30 Dec 2011). http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/courses/533-11/book/

You can download a huge PDF there. We have made individual chapters available in the protected course reader.

If you use Google Calendar, I’ve created one for this class. I will try to keep it up to date with what’s going on for the class.

   (Calendar ID: 22i5m4nkl8qfnv1n4vrapsctes@group.calendar.google.com)

(2/17 – a clarification has been posted).

The exact list of activities in this class will evolve depending on how the class goes.

Also, to accommodate the diversity of backgrounds in this class, and the multiple levels (638 and 838) there will be some options and variability.

But the activities in class will include:

• Lectures and Discussions: you are required to come to class and participate. If you don’t talk much in class, post in the online discussion. Even if you talk in class, contribute the online discussion. It is your responsibility to convince me that you’ve been “present” in class and learning from it (through your in class and online participation).
• Online Conversation: everything posted online should be viable for discussion. Comment on other people’s ideas, point out cool stuff (related to class) you discover on the web, comment on what you’ve learned from lectures, … Hopefully, Piazza will make all activities in this class part of a bigger conversation. And I truly believe you learn more by discussing (talking and listening).
• Readings: There will be a substantial amount of reading for this class. Including (but not limited to) a required textbook, and other readings that will be provided online. For most assigned readings you will have to post a response on Piazza. But in general, it is your responsibility to convince me that you did the reading (through class participation and discussion). For 638, you need to post enough to show that you did the reading. For 838, you need to be an active participant in the reading discussion. For some readings, 838 students will be expected to read more.
• Design Assignments: Everyone will have to try to make some stuff. For 638 students, no assignments will require programming (although, for 838 students you will have to do at least some assignments with a computer). Some assignments will be explicitly “pencil and paper” (although you can use computer drawing tools if you like), while for others you may be encouraged (or required if you’re an 838 student) to use computational tools on real data.
• Critique Assignments: These will be similar to readings, but require you to critique (and maybe redesign) a visualization. In some cases, you will have to find a visualization to comment on. In other cases, you will be assigned a visualization. Sometimes, you’ll need to critique another class member’s work (be constructive!).
• Project: if you’re an 838 student, you will be required to complete 1 big or 2 small projects. If you are a 638 student, you will be required to do 1 small project. There will be 2 small projects. 638 students will have lower expectations for them. Students will have the option of having their 2nd project build on the first to make one “big” project.

Some of the design and critique assignments and projects may be done in pairs or groups.

Grading

Grading will be arbitrary and subjective and totally at the instructors discretion. It may involve randomness.

More seriously: the grading will be roughly split between the “subjective” aspects (lecture and online participation, readings) and the “objective” aspects (assignments and projects).

For the “subjective” aspects, your grade is based on my subjective impression of how well you did with it – this will be formed by your participation in class, online, in talking to me, … It’s your job to convince me you’re learning! There will also be an objective component to this (keeping track of who comes to class, statistics on Piazza postings).

We will not have exams. You need to use the mechanisms of the class to convince me that you have learned the material.

This class is scheduled to meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 11-12:15 in 1257 Computer Sciences.

Presence and participation in class is required. If you don’t feel comfortable talking much in class, or don’t get the opportunity to (since there are a lot of people), you can participate online via Piazza.

Note: presence in class means more than just showing up. It means being actively engaged. It’s your job to convince me that this is the case – either by participating in the discussion, or by contributing the the online discussion afterwards.

If you choose to use a laptop in class, it must only be for class related activities. I reserve the right to call you on it to show off what class related thing you are doing. If you are taking notes electronically (the most common excuse for wanting a laptop in class) I ask that you either send me a copy of the notes, or post them to the Piazza lecture discussion. (this is more about curiosity about people’s note-taking habits and believing in their potential collective value than to check up on you).

Missing Lectures

If you are going to miss a required class meeting, please let me know, preferably ahead of time.  It is your responsibility to find out what happened in class. It is even more important for you to do a good job with posting about reading or other assignments that we might have discussed.

Fridays (Overscheduled Class)

You may have noticed that this is 4 contact hours worth of class time for 3 credit hours worth of credit. That’s because we will officially only meet for 2 75 minute periods (generally Monday and Wednesday) per week. Friday, we’ll either not have class, or have some optional non-lecture activity.

Some students have noted in the past (with classes similar to this one) that the Friday meetings are not really optional. Even though we didn’t officially keep score, they were valuable enough that people felt compelled to come. And it helped me get to know that students in the class were really learning stuff.

Note: in some weeks, we may choose to have lectures on Fridays in order to accommodate other scheduling constraints.

The main readings for this class will be provided (they will come from papers, or book chapters that I will provide). However, I was going to use so much of Colin Ware’s book, that it defies academic fair use, so it is a required textbook.If you don’t want to buy it, it will be on reserve at Wendt library.But you don’t have to buy it! The library has it online!

Required Textbook:

Visual Thinking: for Design, by Colin Ware. Published by Morgan Kaufman, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0123708960. (amazon)

This is a fabulous book. We’ll use all of the chapters. The only downside is that it isn’t as comprehensive as his earlier book. But I picked this one since Information Visualization might be a little bit too much for some people.

There will be required readings from this book.

Fortunately, the library has this book online through Science Direct, so you don’t need to buy it! (it’s a good book, and you might want to buy it anyway)

Alternate Textbook:

Information Visualization, Second Edition: Perception for Design, by Colin Ware. Published by Morgan Kaufman, 2004. (amazon)

This was going to be my choice for the textbook, but I thought it might be a little much for most students. It overlaps a lot with Visual Thinking for Design. If you own this book, you don’t need to buy Visual Thinking – however, you might want to look at someone else’s copy.

Another Useful Book

Visualizing Data. by Ben Fry. O’Reilly 2008.

This is less a book about visualization than it is about the process of doing visualizations and how to program in Processing. If you’re not a computer scientist, and you need to learn some simple programming to do some visualization, this book is a good place to start. Its more about working through the process of simple examples than giving you insights into visualization in general.

You don’t need to buy this book – UW has access to an online copy (here’s a link that accesses it through the proxy so it works off campus): http://ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/login?url=http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9780596514556

Recommended Reading

Tufte’s books are an essential guide to the design aspects of visualization. For some, they are treated as religon (we’ll discuss this in class). Even if you disagree with him, it’s hard to argue his importance in the field, and the beauty of his books.

If you work in this field, you will want to own these books – they are nice on the coffee table if nothing else. Its hard to justify them as textbooks. I have requested that they be put on reserve at Wendt. We’ll have a reading or two from each (provided as scans).

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. By Edward Tufte. Graphics Press, 2001. (amazon)

Envisioning Information. By Edward Tufte. Graphics Press, 1990. (amazon)

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. By Edward Tufte. Graphics Press, 1997. (amazon)

Beautiful Evidence. By Edward Tufte. Graphics Press, 2006.  (amazon)

At the surface, Scott McCloud’s books seem to be about comics. But, if you dig deeper, you realize that he has a lot of amazingly insightful things to say about visualization in general.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. by Scott McCloud. Harper, 1994(amazon)

I don’t think people would take me seriously if I made this a textbook. But you’ll learn a ton by reading it. It will help you rethink what visual communication is about. His new book is good too, but a little less relevant to a visualization class.

Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics. by Scott McCloud. Haper, 2006.

Other Noteworthy Books

There are a lot of books out there on Vis and related topics. This list is not exhaustive, but are ones that may be useful for people in this class for one reason or another.

 Beautiful Visualization. Edited by Iliinksy and Steele.

This book has essays ranging in quality from annoying to pretty good. What I like best are the essays that describe some design process. One great thing about this book is that the UW Library has it available online. We might use a chapter or two for the class.

 Designing Data Visualizations. By Iliinsky and Steele.

A couple of bloggers write a book about the basics of vis. It’s an OK survey of some of the main ideas (like choosing encodings, …) without any of the academic formality or art/design pompousness. The main thing that makes it recommendable is that the UW Library should get it available online through Safari. I may pick some readings from this book.

We will be using the Piazza online discussion system for this class.

• You can sign up at:  http://piazza.com/wisc/spring2012/cs638cs838
• Once you are signed up, you go to the main piazza dashboard http://piazza.com/class

Please give yourself a profile picture – this will be really useful for all of us to learn each other’s names.

I have no ideas how this will work out – so we’ll experiment. To be honest I have no idea how it will scale to a class this big.

With a class as big as ours, it will be hard for everyone to talk in class. Hopefully, by having a good discussion system, we’ll all be able to participate and learn from one another. That’s the plan. We’ll see how it works. Discussion is one of the best ways to learn. This might make it practical at scale.

Note: I am a little torn as to how best to use Piazza – for example, whether to have people post replies to my messages, or do each person’s assignment as a separate thread. We’ll experiment as the class goes on. Piazza gives us a few basic mechanics that we can employ for our own purposes.

One of Piazza’s main mechanics is a flexible tagging scheme – you can add a hashtag to anything. Be judicious in your use of hashtags: if we have tag soup, their value will be diminished.

I will keep track of who posts what. In addition to doing the required postings, you’ll need to be an active participant in the overall discourse.

What We’ll Use Piazza For

1. We’ll use Piazza as the primary way for you to hand in assignments including reading assignments. I will create a “Question” and you post your response as a “followup discussion” posting to it. For example, for each reading, I will ask you to post a response (sometimes with a specific question, sometime just in general).

Everyone will be able to see everyone else’s postings. I would prefer that you make your own posting before you read others. However – discussion is good. After you post your answer, you should look through other people’s postings – possibly commenting on things that you find interesting.

Note that your “top level” responses (ones made to my posting, as opposed to ones made to other’s postings) get a “resolved” button. We’ll try to use this as a mark that I have looked at your response. I may not give feedback.

2. We’ll use Piazza as a way to discuss lectures. For every lecture, I’ll create a question page so we can have a discussion about the lecture. Or, if there’s some topic from the lecture you want to discuss, you might just create a new discussion topic. I’m not sure what will work best. We’ll try the collective lecture posting thing first.

We will also use Piazza as a general way to discuss Visualization and other topics related to class. If you see some cool visualization, have something you’re curious about, come across something you don’t understand in a reading, need some help with programming, or …. – make a post.  If someone else says something interesting or has a question, or poses an idea, answer them.

3. If you encounter a cool visualization or tool or technique, post it! Give it the #coolstuff tag. Hopefully, everyone will contribute some of these. And discuss.

4. If you have a question, administrative issue, etc. Post the question – that way everyone can see the answer! (someone is probably wondering the same thing).

Piazza will be part of how you are evaluated for the class:

Assignments and Readings are explicitly part of your grade.

You participation in discussion is part of your class participation grade. Ideally, participation is a mix of on-line and in-class. If you don’t get a chance to voice your opinion in class, make sure to post it in a discussion so we know you have it!

Uploading Pictures to Piazza

While many things are great about Piazza, there are some things that they don’t support well. In particular, they aren’t as picture-centric as we might need for this class, so it’s a little bit of a hassle to use pictures in a discussion. However, it’s not so bad once you get the hang of it, and they said they are working on better mechanisms.

Most of the time, you will want to add a post to a discussion. To do this, you need to:

1. Go to the “student response” section – note: the student response section is where all students collaborate to make a response. We won’t use this much. But it is where the “Actions” drop down is.
2. From the actions drop down (in the student response section) use the upload file option. Note: since all students upload files here, please use a name that makes it obvious whose file is whose.
3. When you click on “embed this image” you’ll be given a little snippet of HTML. You can put this into your followup discussion (so copy it). It will look like: <img src="/view/gx0ucbrydHl"/>
4. Create your follow up discussion posting (or edit one you’ve already written).
5. When you insert the html for you image, it will insert the image – full sized. This will be annoying to everyone. So edit the html tag to add a “width” attribute like <img width=”100px” src="/view/gx0ucbrydHl"/>.
6. Now, you need to make a way to give people access to the big image. Type the URL, which is the thing in “src” with “http://piazza.com” in front of it like http://piazza.com/view/gx0ucbrydHl (note: if you put an URL into your posting, Piazza is smart enough to make it linkable).

OK, a bit of a pain, but Piazza has enough other nice features that we’ll deal with this. If it turns out to be too much of a pain, we’ll find something else.