The Week in Vis 04 (Mon, Sep 24 – Fri, Sep 28): Encodings

by Mike Gleicher on September 21, 2018

Class Meetings
  • Mon, Sep 24 – Lecture:Encodings
  • Wed, Sep 26 – ICE: Standard Designs
  • Fri, Sep 28 – OPT:TableauAndTools
Week Deadlines

Last week, we talked about abstraction, tried to use it in our critiques in the in class exercises, and chose data sets for Design Challenge 1. (you did choose a data set for design challenge 1, right?)

Now that we have our data and task, we can figure out how to map these to things we see. That is, how we encode them using visual variables. As usual, Monday I’ll talk about it in lecture (with more pictures than last week’s lecture), and Wednesday we’ll do an in-class exercise to practice the concepts. I am aware the past 2 seek and finds haven’t used your art supplies. This week may involve more drawing.

Friday’s optional class will be a chance to look at Tableau. You might want to try it out before Friday, or bring you laptop with it installed so you can follow along. If you’re curious about the connection between Tableau and what we’re doing in the lecture part of class, check out the “Show Me” paper from last week’s reading list (it was optional).

Whether or not you are going to try Tableau, there is checkpoint for DC1 due on Friday.

You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 4: Week 4 – Encodings.

Readings (due Mon, Sep 24 – preferably before class)

This week, the topic is Encodings. The Visual channels to which we can map data. These can be thought of as the building blocks from which visualizations are constructed. We’ll read about different encodings, and hopefully get a sense of why you might choose one over the other. And you’ll look at some standard designs and try to understand how they are put together from encodings.

The primary readings are three chapters that discuss the different encodings, and a classic paper they all refer to:

  1. Marks and Channels (Chapter 5 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-05-MarksAndChannels.pdf 0.4mb)

    A nice discussion of the main encodings, with information of how they differ and how to choose.

  2. Arrange Tables (Chapter 7 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-07-ArrangeTables.pdf 0.6mb)

    Position encodings are extra important and potentially more complex, so they get their own chapter. This chapter is particularly interesting because Munzner shows us how to break down a lot of standard (and some not so standard) charts into basic encodings. (note that we’ve skipped over Chapters 4 and 6 – we’ll come back to these).

  3. Basic Principles of Visualization (Chapter 5 of The Truthful Art) (theTruthfulArtCh5.pdf 10.2mb)

    In some ways, this is redundant with Munzner – but I like it as a different perspective, less formal and academic. It provides some thoughts on how to make practical use of the research literature (which we will look at).

  4. Cleveland and McGill. Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data. Science 229(4716), 1985. (online library) (ClevelandMcGill85.pdf 1.3mb)

    This paper is referred to by Munzner, Cairo, and, well, everyone else. It’s the first rigorous attempt to understand how people perform at reading encodings. I think it’s important to see the original paper, so you know what they are talking about.

    There are many more recent papers that continue the tradition of trying to rigorously and empirically determine what works and doesn’t work. It’s become a whole genre. We’ll see more when we talk about evaluation and perception.

Optional:

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