Class Meetings
- Mon, Dec 10 – Lecture:SciVis
- Wed, Dec 12 – Lecture:Summary
- Fri, Dec 14 – No Class: Semester Over
Week Deadlines
- Reading: Week 15 – SciVis and Research (due Mon, Dec 10 – preferably before class)
- Quiz 15: 15: (due Tue, Dec 11)
- Online Discussion 15: Vis Research (first post due Wed, Dec 12)
- Seek and Find 15: Pick Something (due Fri, Dec 14)
- Design Challenge: DC3:Final (due Fri, Dec 14)
If you haven’t done a course evaluation, please do it! https://aefis.wisc.edu/
Last week we wrapped up talking about graphs, did the route maps exercise, watched cartoons, and I ranted about presentations.
There is class this week – it may seem anti-climatic, but there is still more to talk about. We won’t get to do everything.
Monday’s lecture will be able “Traditional Scientific Visualization” – basically, a survey of things that would be in a traditional visualization course. It’s a different kind of visualization topics.
Wednesday’s lecture will be a summary day. A chance to look back over the semester and reflect on what we’ve been through. We’ll use this as a chance to talk about visualization research directions – with a focus on what I am interested in. Sadly, we didn’t get much time during the semester to talk about visualization for machine learning, helping with decision making under uncertainty, designing summaries of collections of complex objects, … – so maybe we can talk about that.
You may be wondering “what is visualization research” – and this week’s assignment (and Wednesday’s class) should give you an idea. We’ve focused the semester on things that visualization knowledge knows how to do – now we’ll look beyond to the kinds of things we still need to figure out.
You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 15: Week 15 – Visualization Research.
Oh – and there’s that Design Challenge due on Friday.
Readings (due Mon, Dec 10 – preferably before class)
Two seemingly separate things. But, a large chunk of visualization research is on the topic of “Scientific Visualization” – which we didn’t touch this semester.
For Scientific Visualization, there is nothing I know of that is at the right level of detail. The chapter from Munzner will give you some of the basic concepts.
- Arrange Spatial Data (Chapter 8 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-08-ArrangeSpatial.pdf 1.0mb)
I want you to have a sense of what visualization research is nowadays. What I’d like you to do is…
Look at the titles of the papers from either the 2018 or 2017 Vis conference. Notice that there are 3 separate sub-conferences (VAST, InfoVis, and SciVis). From looking at the titles, you can hopefully get a sense of what the topics are. There are 25 second video previews, and links so you can get the actual papers (via the IEEE digital library). You can look at the 2016 lists if that’s more convenient. (warning the 25 second previews aren’t always that useful – making informative 25 second videos is hard, and the quality is variable)
- 2018 Session List is organized in the order of presentation, but it has links to the “video previews” (25 seconds) that have the abstracts on the pages. Unlike the 2017 page, there are no links to the papers themselves. The 2018 Accepted Papers List is easier to see the titles, but doesn’t have links.
- 2017 Session List is organized in the order of presentation, but it has links to the “video previews” (25 seconds) that have the abstracts on the pages. The DOI links will take you to the digital library. The 2017 Official Papers List is easier to read, but lacks the links.
- Unofficial Papers Lists (with links to PDFs)
You are not required to read any papers. But, I would like you to look at at least some of the abstracts to papers whose titles you find intriguing (things that you might be interested in enough to want to read), or at least watch a few of the videos (the videos are often not very good).
Optional
This is the closest thing I can find to a survey paper about volume rendering (which is probably the most common case). The front parts cover the basics, but it quickly gets into more detail than you probably want.
- Arie Kaufman and Klaus Mueller. Overview of Volume Rendering. Chapter 7 of The Visualization Handbook (Hansen and Johnson eds), Academic Press, 2005. (chapter7-volumerendering.pdf 0.7mb)