DC1 Grades

by Mike Gleicher on November 2, 2018

DC1 Grades are being posted to Canvas.

A few things to note:

  1. Your grade is given out of 4 points (4=A, 3.5=AB, 3=B, 2.5=BC). Canvas doesn’t like the A/AB/B grading, so I can’t figure out how to make it do that.
  2. Feedback is presented as a comment. All comments are posted as me.
  3. All assignments were graded by both Mary and me. You will get two “scoring sheets” (one from each of us). If we didn’t have consensus on the grade, we discussed it.
  4. Some of the rubric questions may not be answered – which can look funny. The questions for each design are:
- Question/Story: interesting, clear, ...
- Multi-Variate:
- Design: appropriate, effective
- Details: good choices?

If you see these in your comments we are not questioning your details, or saying that your design is appropriate and effective – those are the questions (not the answers).

 

DC2 Phase 3 – and feedback

by Mike Gleicher on November 2, 2018

I realize that we haven’t been providing a lot of feedback on initial designs. Some students have come to talk to me (at office hours, or after class) – but it hasn’t been that many.

If you turn in DC2 Phase 3 on time (e.g., today), I will provide feedback on your designs this weekend – which is hopefully enough time for you to take it into account. The feedback isn’t a grade (the assignment is just check/no check), but I’ll try to give you some ideas on how well you are on target.

Please note: it is really important that in your DC3, you make clear if you will want to give a demo of your project and who your partner is. Please put this into the type-in box of the assignment.

The Week in Vis 10 (Mon, Nov 5 – Fri, Nov 9): Scale

by Mike Gleicher on November 2, 2018

Class Meetings
  • Mon, Nov 5 – Lecture:Too Much Stuff
  • Wed, Nov 7 – ICE:DC1 Critiques
  • Fri, Nov 9 – No Class
Week Deadlines

Last week we had an odd schedule – this week we’re back to normal. We talked about interaction.

This week, we’ll touch on one of the great challenges of visualization: how to deal with lots of data. What to do when you have “too much stuff” to show. (“Too Much Stuff” was a reference to an old blues song, but that was before the phrase took on a new meaning with the “minimalist” movement).

One of the “readings” (the T-SNE web page below) is a great example of what I was talking about last week with using interaction to help someone learn how a complicated model works.

The ICE this week will involve critiquing some DC1 assignments. (yes, you will get your grades back before then). We’ll mainly look at old ones. And in many cases, they will be good examples of challenges of having too much stuff.

And, of course, DC2 is due. Look for information how to sign up to give a demo (if you want to give a demo). As always, we have a pretty lenient late policy – but be aware, DC3 starts up immeditately!

If you’re curious DC3 is posted. But you probably want to finish DC2 first.

You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 10: Week 10 – Uncertainty and Modeling.

Readings (due Mon, Nov 5 – preferably before class)

This is a big and important topic, but rather than require a lot of reading, I’ll give you less – and hope that you’ll go beyond the minimum.

These 4 things are required. The Munzner chapters are fairly short, and the TSNE web page is light reading and fun to play with.

  1. Reduce Items and Dimensions (Chapter 13 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-13-Reduce.pdf 0.4mb)
  2. Embed: Focus+Context (Chapter 14 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-14-Embed.pdf 0.5mb)
  3. How to Use T-SNE Effectively – I wanted to give you a good foundation on dimensionality reduction. This isn’t it. But… it will make you appreciate why you need to be careful with dimensionality reduction (especially fancy kinds of it).
  4. Sarikaya, Gleicher and Szafir. Design Factors for Summary Visualization in Visual Analytics. (web) – This is a survey of different ways of doing summarization that appear in the visualization literature. There is a lot about how the survey was conducted, but the main thing for class is to see the different categories of summarization and how they interact.

Optional

These are both really good surveys. They were going to be required. Instead, consider them “strongly recommended”.

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Sample Data Generator for DC2

by Mike Gleicher on November 1, 2018

I have posted the code that generated the sample data for DC2 to the GitHub repo (that has one of the baseline visualizations):

https://github.com/gleicher/765-2018-DC2-Sample-Code

It’s very simple and boring – but can serve as a starting point for making a more interesting random data generator.

For DC2, you may need to create data to show off your system. If you create interesting sample data (simulated discussions that have interesting properties), and are willing to share them with others, please let me know.

Creating interesting sample data is one way for you to make your project interesting.

Slides from Lectures

by Mike Gleicher on October 31, 2018

The slides from lectures are now caught up through today.

As a reminder, they are all in the Canvas Files section, or you can follow this link.

The Week in Vis 09 (Mon, Oct 29 – Fri, Nov 2): Interaction

by Mike Gleicher on October 26, 2018

Class Meetings
  • Mon, Oct 29 – No Class
  • Wed, Oct 31 – Lecture:Interaction
  • Fri, Nov 2 – ICE:Glyph Design (Paris Apartments)
Week Deadlines

Remember, this week we’re on the odd schedule with no class on Monday (October 29th), but classes on Wednesday and Friday.

Last week, we spent the whole week on Color. This week, we’ll move on to talk about interaction. It’s something that’s better to experience than to talk about, so we’ll look at examples. For the ICE, we’ll do a design problem that will help us thinking about how to combine different encodings.

You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 9: Week 9 – Interaction.

Readings (due Mon, Oct 29 – preferably before class)

The first reading is a survey paper that provides a good way to organize many of the interactions we see in visualization, and provides lots of good examples.

  1. Heer, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2012). Interactive dynamics for visual analysis. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 45. (pdf) (doi)
  2. Maniplate View (Chapter 11 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-11-ManipulateView.pdf 0.5mb)
  3. Facet into Multiple Views (Chapter 12 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-12-FacetMultipleViews.pdf 1.0mb)This isn’t specific to interaction, but it fits better here than anywhere else.

Optional

I’ll use this paper to frame the discussion in class. It provides a good “why not add interaction” point of view.

  • Lam, H. (2008). A Framework of Interaction Costs in Information Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 14(6), 1149–1156. (doi). (pdf link to Heidi’s page)

Example question list for DC2

by Mike Gleicher on October 26, 2018

We (well, mainly Mary) has compiled a list of the questions people came up with for DC2. I have put it as a file on Canvas. You can view it here.

Assignment Comments (please don’t use!)

by Mike Gleicher on October 19, 2018

Among Canvas’ many features, is the “assignment comments” thing, which lets students and graders leave comments on assignments.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to alert us to when comments are made (at least us graders – I am not sure about the students). So, if you leave a comment for us (the course staff), we may not see it unless we look. We will assume you won’t see comments that we leave, unless you are looking otherwise.

So, for this class:

  1. You (as a student) should not leave an assignment comment except when it accompanies the submission of an assignment. If you want to comment on a grade or assignment comment you were given, please use either email or the Canvas messaging system (which I don’t know how to use, but it sends me email). We will only see your assignment comments when we grade your assignment – not before, or after.
  2. We (course staff) will only use assignment comments when we give you a grade to explain what your grade was. Any followup discussion will happen using another communication mechanism). We will expect that you look at assignment comments when you get your grade (so you can see feedback).

Sorry this is complicated – once again, making Canvas work for the class is tricky.

The Week in Vis 08 (Mon, Oct 22 – Fri, Oct 26): Color and Graphical Perception

by Mike Gleicher on October 19, 2018

Class Meetings
  • Mon, Oct 22 – Lecture:Color and Experiments
  • Wed, Oct 24 – ICE:Glyph Design (Paris Apartments)
  • Fri, Oct 26 – No Class
Week Deadlines

Last week, we talked about perception generally, and looked at design. This week, we’ll focus on a specific aspect of perception (color) which has all kinds of implications for design.

You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 8: Week 8 – Color and Graphical Perception.

Readings (due Mon, Oct 22 – preferably before class)

Color is a surprisingly complex topic – and the complexities of perception and display have real impact on how we use it for Vis. There is some redundancy in these readings, but it’s hard for me to choose which ones are best. It’s probably OK to see it multiple ways. This is actually less reading than I’ve given in the past for the topic (see 2015 Color Readings)

We’ll also use this as an opportunity to re-visit being empirical about our recommendations for visual encodings: the idea of using perception (both principles as well as experimental methodologies) to inform our choices (this is called “graphical perception”).

Color

  1. Maureen Stone. Expert Color Choices for Presenting Data. Web Resource.Maureen really is an expert on color. This is a good review of the basics, and then gets into why it’s important to get it right, and how to do it.
  2. Color (Chapter 4 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-4-Color.pdf 2.8mb)
  3. Map Color and Other Channels (Munzner-10-MapColor.pdf 0.4mb)Color is really 10-10.3, 10.4 talks about other channels. It’s a good reminder.
  4. Borland, D., & Taylor, R. (2007). Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 27(2), 14–17. (rainbow-still-considered-harmful.pdf 0.7mb) (doi)The rainbow color map is still used (10 years after this paper). Understanding why you shouldn’t use it is a good way to check your understanding of color ramp design. Breaking that rule (and using it effectively) is a more advanced topic. Most uses of rainbows are ineffective.

    A more recent paper (Bujack et. al – optional below) gets at this in a more mathematical way, but it’s overkill for class purposes.

Graphical Perception (required)

The key reading was Cleveland and McGill “Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data” (ClevelandMcGill85.pdf 1.3mb), which was already a reading in Week 4 (encodings) – so that’s optional. Heer&Bostock “Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design” was optional for that week.

While I’d like you to read both of these, two papers in addition to everything above may get to be a little much. You don’t need to read these papers in detail – skim over them to get the basic ideas and results. But also read through one of them to get a feeling for the methodology and analysis. Reading both papers is optional.

  1. Assessing Effects of Task and Data Distribution on the Effectiveness of Visual Encodings. Younghoon Kim, Jeffrey Heer. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. EuroVis), 2018 (web page with PDF)I chose this one (instead of Heer and Bostock) because it is very recent, and gets at the interaction between task, data, and encodings.
  2. Danielle Albers Szafir. “Modeling Color Difference for Visualization Design.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2018. In the Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE VIS Conference. (best paper award winner).This paper is really practical in that it shows how color science and modeling and be used to tell us what will and won’t work in visualization. It shows the value in careful experimentation and modeling. It’s a good fit because it focuses on color. And she’s my former student.

Color: Optional

We’ll talk about Color Brewer in class, but if you want to know the science about it:

  • Cynthia Brewer. Color Use Guidelines for Data Representation. Proceedings of the Section on Statistical Graphics, American Statistical Association, Alexandria VA. pp. 55-60. (web) (Brewer_1999_Color-Use-Guidelines-ASAproc.pdf 1.5mb)The actual paper isn’t so important – it’s the guidelines she used in creating Color Brewer, which also tells us how to use it. What is more important is to actually check out ColorBrewer which is a web tool that gives you color maps. Understand how to pick color maps with it, and try to get a sense of why they are good.

    The irony is that this, one of the most important papers about color, wasn’t printed in color!

If you want a little more of how color science and vis come together.

  • Bujack, R., Turton, T. L., Samsel, F., Ware, C., Rogers, D. H., & Ahrens, J. (2017). The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Theoretical Framework for the Assessment of Continuous Colormaps. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 24(1 (Proceedings SciVis)). (doi)This paper does a serious, deep dive into figuring out what makes a good or bad color ramp and making the intuitions mathematical. You can play with their tool for assessing color ramps.

In case you want a few other perspectives on color…

  • Color and Information (Tufte’s Chapter 5 of Envisioning Information) (2-EI-5-ColorandInformation-small.pdf 4.3mb)Tufte is famously anti-color, except when he isn’t.
  • Chapter 10, Principles of Color (Slocum-principles_of_color_cropped.pdf 8.9mb), from Thematic Cartography and Geographic Visualization, 2nd edition by Slocum et. al.This is from a cartography (map making) textbook – but it’s a great intro since it gets into some of the technical issues of reproduction.
  • Chapter 5, The Perception of Color (perception-of-color.pdf 19.5mb), from Sensing and Perception (a psychology of perception book).As you might expect, a Psychology textbook will give you even more about the science of color. It’s probably more of the perceptual science than you want, unless you’re a perceptual science researcher in which case you may have read it already.
  • Here are some postings from a design blog that give a nice tutorial that is a little more design oriented:

Graphical Perception (optional)

This was a reading in week 4, looking at it again is optional.

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The Week in Vis 07 (Mon, Oct 15 – Fri, Oct 19): Perception and Design

by Mike Gleicher on October 11, 2018

Class Meetings
  • Mon, Oct 15 – Lecture:Perception and Design
  • Wed, Oct 17 – ICE:Design School
  • Fri, Oct 19 – OPT:D3 Tutorial
Week Deadlines

Last week we talked about evaluation, wrapped up Design Challenge 1, and talked about Design Challenge 2 – which is starting already!

This week 4 different things are going on:

  1. In lecture on Monday, we’ll talk about human perception – which is a fascinating topic, and should influence how we think about visualization design.
  2. In lecture/ICE on Wednesday, we’ll talk about graphic design. Design School in a Day? Not quite, but hopefully it will be better than nothing.
  3. Design Challenge 2 has begun! The first check point is this week!
  4. On Friday, there will be an optional tutorial on D3 – given by Florian Heimerl, a post-doc who works with me. He knows way more about D3 than me.

You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 7: Week 7 – Perception and Design.

Readings (due Mon, Oct 15 – preferably before class)

This week puts together two (seemingly) disparate topics: perception and (graphic) design. Both are huge topics – you could get a degree in either, but they come together in an interesting way. Perception influences all visual design, not just visualization. So they are a natural coupling.

As you read about perception, think about how it effects design. As you read about design, consider how it is motivated by perception.

Yes, this is a lot to read – but the (required) design readings are really short. It’s not really 10 readings – one is just web demos, and the design book chapters are really short.

Perception (required)

The main readings are the Ware chapters, since it’s a good introduction to the basics of perception, and its impact on design. Chapter 6 of Cairo is useful because it considers “higher level” perceptual issues. I also include Cairo Chapter 5 (as optional) because it’s redundant with Ware, but it’s fun to see his (less scientific) take on it. And look at Chris Healy’s web page to get a sense of pre-attentive effects.

I also want you to look at the Healy and Enns paper / resources. It is sufficient to look at the web survey (since it has the cool demos).

  1. Visual Queries (Chapter 1 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-1-VisualQueries.pdf 2.5mb)
  2. What We Can Easily See (Chapter 2 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-2-EasilySee.pdf 2.1mb)
  3. Structuring Two Dimensional Space (Chapter 3 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-3-StructuringSpace.pdf 2.6mb)
  4. Visualizing for the Mind (Chapter 6 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh6.pdf 8.1mb)
  5. Look at the pre-attention demos and pictures in the old version of Chris Healey’s web survey of perceptual principles for vis. The paper (optional, below) is much better in terms of explaining things – but it’s too much to require as reading.

Design (required)

Part 1 is connected to the “Design School” (posting coming). While a little bit of reading is not going to make you a designer, it can begin the process of getting you to improve. And it will give you something to practice. I really like these basic lessons of 4 basic principles from Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book. These 4 brief chapters (and a summary chapter) will give you the idea of the CARP principles (contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity). People who are good designers (and teach design) tell me this is a great place to start. I feel that learning this has helped me (and generations of students seem to agree). Yes, this is 5 chapters, but they are really short (a few pages each).

Design: Optional

Part 1: It’s not hard to find things to read about design. But, if you want a little more than the first 4 principles from Williams, I think that these Chapters from Kadavy’s Design for Hackers give a nice presentation of some other basic design principles that are really hard to describe.

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