Hard to believe we’re so close to the end.
This week has the best punny title: D3 and 3D. They have nothing to do with each other, except they are transpositions of the names, and they are topics I wanted to talk about in class, but, of course, there isn’t enough time to do them justice.
On Tuesday, we’ll talk about the 3rd dimension. How we see it, how we show it with computers. What this might mean for visualization. As you can guess, it’s a huge topic, and we’ll barely scratch the surface. Before Tuesday’s lecture, please do Reading 22A which will give you a good start into the huge topic.
As part of our dipping our toes into the world of 3D, you’ll need to do Seek and Find 13. Given the past few seek and finds, I’ll bet you’ll find some things that are really cool.
On Thursday, we’ll talk about a toolkit for building in-browser 2D visualizations called D3. If you’re not a programmer, you might think “yawn” to a toolkit, but I think its actually interesting/helpful to see how they used their knowledge of what kinds of visualizations people need to make to create tools for making them. The abstractions are interesting for thinking about vis – even if you don’t program using D3. You can do the discussion part of Reading 22B after Thursday’s lecture, but you might want to at least look at the readings.
Phase 1 of the Design Challenge is due on Wednesday, April 29th. I’m curious to see what you come up with!
At some point in the next 2 weeks (e.g. before the end of the semester), I will also ask you to do a survey to help me plan future versions of the class, as well as standard course evals.
The final week, we’ll talk about traditional scientific visualziation (volumes, flows). This could be a whole class in itself. And we’ll also probably do some kind of activity to sum up the semester. I’m going to ask you to watch a video and think about presentations. Maybe we’ll talk about presentations in class.
