This website is for the 2015 Edition of the Visualization class. If you are looking for the Spring 2017 edition, please go here.

So, it seems that if you go to: https://aefis.engr.wisc.edu to do your course evaluation, you will see this class listed multiple times.

The authorities have no idea why this is happening (I have a guess).

But… it shouldn’t matter. They all should go to the same place. Just do one of them.

The official course evaluations can be done online. Log into:

https://aefis.engr.wisc.edu

and your should see either CS638 or CS838.

Please do the official on-line evaluation! I really do read them, and it really helps for future planning.

Our department is in the process of switching to on-line evaluations. This class is a pilot experiment. (since I am on the committee that has to figure it out). My experience is that online evals are better: less work for the student, and it puts the information in one place so its easier for the people who read the evaluations.

So, please take a few minutes of your time and go to: https://aefis.engr.wisc.edu

Thank you.

Kevin Ponto is teaching his Virtual Reality class this coming Fall. Info is here. It should be cross-listed as a CS class, but the campus curriculum committee is taking its time processing the paperwork.

I am teaching CS559, Computer Graphics, in the event that you’ve gotten used to having a Tuesday/Thursday 11am class with me. It’s kind of the opposite of this class: programming project oriented, math, something I have taught before…

If you’re interested in doing more Vis stuff, let me know. There’s no formal class planned, but there’s always opportunities for projects.

I did not have a chance to read all of the Design Challenge 3 Critiques. But I did read many – and they were almost all really good.

Here is some commentary on them, that might help for phase 2:

1. People took a wide range of level of abstraction to consider. Some people critiqued the specific pictures I made, while others considered the most abstract task (looking at a ranked list), and other people picked things in between. All of this is OK: I didn’t really specify which level of abstraction to consider. Each level has its challenges. (I was going to say that the specific examples are easiest to pick apart, but they also suffer most from lack of context).
2. It is good that people called me out on some very basic graph making things. Guilty as charged! My defense would  say “if we were actually to use one of these diagrams, it would have a good figure caption that explained it, and a story in the text of the paper.”
3. There is a whole host of issues that relate to what the Explainers are, and how they are computed. Some of these come from trying to interpret them out of context (if you’re not a literary scholar, some of these might not make any sense – and even then, you need to be familiar with the Docuscope varaibles). In general, I’d say these are not really Visualization issues – but maybe they are? Maybe there are ways to make the viewer familiar with the meaning of the variables, or other pieces of context.
4. Many people pointed out an entire class of tasks these diagrams are bad at: dealing with specific items. (try to find your favorite play in this, or the city you want to visit in this). I couldn’t label all the points (in order to save space). But what could I have done? (even labeling them all doesn’t completely help)
5. People had mixed opinions on my color choices. Hopefully, you can find more interesting things to comment on too – but the colors are fair game. The colors for the genre experiments do come from a Brewer qualitative ramp, but these are not perfect.
6. Scale is certainly the biggest challenge. The big examples (figures 8-10) show lots of items. (getting to over 1000 – but you can imagine cases where you have 10,000 – or more!) But you could also imagine more than 4 classes (for Figure 9, there are actually 12 genres). You could imagine wanting to compare more than a handful of rankings. …
7. As I think I mentioned, there is VERY limited interaction in these. That’s a potential source of improvement. How would you use interaction to address some of the problems with Explainers.
8. I was thinking that people would focus on the “explainers diagram” (the thing for showing scored/ranked lists). But some people had interesting comments on other diagrams (like the scagnostics-like thing), and some people even had interesting comments on the Explainers concepts themselves. All is fair game, but I don’t want people to feel like they need to understand all the math behind explainers in order to do the assignment. Of course, if you want to improve the math behind them, it needs some help too!
9. It might not be obvious, but the Y dimension is used consistently in the diagrams. For the list, its used to show the rank. For everything on the right of the splines, it is the value on the scale (everything uses the same scale).
10. Many people commented that it is hard to learn to read these diagrams. The fact that I needed to make a special extra-simple example with a long explanation for “training” is proof of these points. Some people pointed out that the task of some of the examples was to explain the visualizations for later tasks, …
11. There is no discussion of how you specify what Explainer you want to see, how to put them together in the pictures, how you specify what is in the picture, … If you really want to know… I have to write Python scripts. My collaborators send me email with questions, and I send them back pictures.
12. It is actually possible to allow for more detailed queries “Find me an explainer of American-ness where Minneapolis is the most American city” – or “Find me an explainer of tragicness where Hamlet is the most tragic of all plays.” There is no interface for doing this (something you could try to add). (the math behind the scenes is also a little ugly, but that’s another story)
13. Understanding the variables is a problem. And one that I think actually could be addressed with some visualization.
14. Comparing orderings is hard. It isn’t shown at all in the bigger diagrams (look at figure 8 – there is no sense that the ordering of the documents is completely different, even if the scores are the same). In the smaller diagrams, you are kindof on your own to make the comparisons. This is a hard general problem you might want to solve. It generalizes well beyond Explainers.

Here’s another (hard) example: 550 plays. (figure10) – I am mainly including it to show that I had already fixed some of the little things some people pointed out.

Wow, we’ve gotten to the end.

One big thing this week will be course evals. I may also give an additional survey to get more feedback. I actually really care about this, since I do want to know people’s opinions so I can plan future Vis courses. The exact mechanics will still be worked out (since there are some issues with the regular course evaluations, but that’s a longer story).

In class this week…

• On Tuesday, I plan to talk about traditional “Scientific” visualization.
• On Thursday, I plan to try to give a summary of where we’ve been, but I might decide to talk about any of the topics we missed over the course of the semester (including animation and presentations). We’ll probably do a last design exercise, because people seem to like them. And its good practice.

Due this week…

• The design challenge. People did phase 1. So I think everyone’s on top of it.
• One last Seek and Find, due May 6.
• One last discussion (with a “reading”). Initial posting due on Monday May 4 – this will hopefully provoke some discussion through the week.
• One last 838 only assignment, initial posting due May 4, but again, I am hoping this will lead to some discussion.

We’re really getting to the end!

Here are the last assignments…

• While not an assignment, we will do course evaluations on-line. Details coming soon. I really do care about your opinion, so please take the time to fill out an evaluation (even if just the few moments to fill in the numerical questions). I may or may not do an additional survey to ask class-specific questions to get your advice on how to do this class next time.
• There is one last seek and find to do, due Weds May 6.
• There is an 838 only assignment, due Mon May 4, to discuss Visualization in your field. Hopefully, this will lead to some interesting discussion.
• There is a last “Reading/Discussion” assignment on animation and presentations, due Monday May 4, which again may lead to a lot of discussion. This is “reading” in quotes because it’s more of a watching (videos) than a reading.
• There is the last regular reading (about D3) it’s due by May 1st.
• There is the seek and find on 3D due April 29.
• And, of course, there is the Design Challenge, with phases due on April 29th and May 6th. Actually, given the long list of thing above, let’s make that May 8th. I wanted it to be due before the last day of class so we could look at the results in class, but…

That’s quite a flurry at the end. But, there’s no exam, or summary activity.

Also: we will be doing grading early during exam week. The good news is, we’ll get grades back to you early in the week. The bad news is, we’ll need to have all the information to make grades. This will limit our ability to take late assignments. There’s some university policy about things not being due during exam week, which means that officially, everything is due by May 8th.

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.

I had promised to give people information on grading. We have a pretty good guess on how we will give final grades, so I tried to write it down. If you’re curious, it’s here. If you want to know where you stand, ask Alper (who has the spreadsheet). He can’t figure out your grade, but can figure out your counts for the various parts (for the ones he’s counted so far).

Design Challenge 3 has been posted here. I didn’t want to put the long posting into the news feed.