As part of Design Challenge 1, you must critique 3 of your classmate’s designs. Design Challenge 1 (DC1): One dataset / Four Stories (peer-review) is a component of Phase 4 of DC1.

Here are detailed instructions on how they will work.

This is an unusual week. The topic, implementation, is unusual. While I’d like everyone to have a sense of the range of tools, and how you might select among them. But I don’t expect you to learn any specific tool (or more to the point, I don’t expect everyone to learn about the same tool).

This week is also special since we’ll have a guest lecture on Wednesday: Prof. Dominik Moritz from CMU (and Apple and Washington before that). In addition to being an expert on Vis implementation, he is a great speaker.

Readings 05: Implementation - are unusual because it has you pick some of the readings, and has things that are more of a “doing” than a reading.

• Online Discussion 05: Implementation (due Tue, Sep 29) will ask you to think about implementation choices that you will make.
• Seek and Find 05: Implementation (due Fri, Oct 2) asks you to think about how .
• In class we will have the guest lecture on Wednesday. Friday will be a more typical class.
• Survey 05: Implementation (due Fri, Oct 2) - these are helping me help you, as well as (hopefully) helping you reflect on the material.
• And, of course Design Challenge 1 is ongoing. Last week, DC1-2: Experiments / Drafts (due Mon, Sep 28) which checked that you got started. This week DC1-3: Design Handins (due Mon, Oct 5) will ask you to turn in visualizations. Note this is a hard deadline since we need to send out your designs for peer review.

This week, we’ll talk about encodings: the ways that we connect data to visual elements (so that they address tasks). These are the building blocks that we will use to create visualization (and decompose visualizations into for analysis).

Readings 04: Encoding - will point out the basics of encodings, and give you a first entry point to the literature on how to choose them.

• Online Discussion 04: Encoding (due Tue, Sep 22) will give you an opportunity to practice looking at visualizations in terms of encodings, and ask you to start to think about why you might pick one over the other.
• Seek and Find 04: Encoding (due Fri, Sep 25) will give you more practice at taking visualizations apart to understand them.
• In class we will focus on how the various encodings work together, in particular to assemble standard (and non-standard visualizations)
• Survey 04: Encoding (due Fri, Sep 25) - these are helping me help you, as well as (hopefully) helping you reflect on the material.
• And, of course Design Challenge 1 is ongoing. This week, you need to pick your data set and start working with it. Last week, DC1-1: Tableau Tests (due Mon, Sep 21) asked you to try out Tableau, while this week’s DC1-2: Experiments / Drafts (due Mon, Sep 28) asks that you start working with your data. this means you need to pick your dataset from DC1 Data Sets

Week number 3…

We’re slowly getting the mechanics worked out - hopefully you are able to do all of the Parts of Class, and the synchronous classes haven’t been too problematic.

This week’s topic is abstraction: how do we talk about tasks and data in a general way.

Readings 03: Abstraction - will get at the main ideas, and suggest some things to look at beyond the minimum.

• Online Discussion 03: Abstraction (due Tue, Sep 15) - as usual, there are two parts (one due on Tuesday, one due on Friday)
• Seek and Find 03: Abstraction (due Fri, Sep 18), which is more practice at thinking about task and data abstraction.
• Survey 03: Abstraction (due Fri, Sep 18) - these are helping me help you, as well as (hopefully) helping you reflect on the material.
• Design Challenge 1 is beginning! The first phase is due at the beginning of next week. DC1-1: Tableau Tests (due Mon, Sep 21)

49 people took survey #1 (so far, although I only saw 48 answers when I checked).

The results are summarized below.

On Friday, we had In-Class Exercise 1: a simple design exercise to get you started with thinking about visualization design.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time, so I didn’t get to discuss what we did, and connect it to the lessons I wanted you to learn. I tried to race through some of the material at the end, but that didn’t work so well.

As an experiment, I created a video “mini-lecture” that tries to convey the post-exercise summary. You can see the video here on Kaltura MediaSpace. I have also uploaded the slides for this to Canvas.

Videos for the class will be posted on Kaltura Media Space. There is a channel that you can subscribe to, and we will post about videos as they become available. We’ll also make a “resource” page listing videos, slides, etc.

Week number 2…

We’ve made it through week 1, and done all of the different parts of class (except for design challenges). If you didn’t do week 1’s seek and find, online discussion, or survey, please do it (better late than never).

Readings 02: Why Visualize? This week has more readings than usual. There are some for before class on Wednesday (or really, before your first discussion post), some for before class on Friday, and some to read after wednesday’s class (since I’ll help put them in context with the lecture). This week is unusual is there are the readings (on critique practice) to read before Friday’s class.

• Online Discussion 02: Why Visualize? (due Tue, Sep 8) will follow the usual pattern (one post due Tuesday, one post due Friday, discussion throughout).
• Seek and Find 02: Why Visualize? (due Fri, Sep 11) - hopefully, you’re getting the hang of the seek and finds.
• Survey 02: Why Visualize? (due Fri, Sep 11) - again, this is to help me and to get you to think about what we’ve done during the week.
• Class Wednesday will be more lecture like, and on Friday we’ll do a critique practice exercise.

This is the first of a weekly posting called The Week in Vis that explains what is going on in class during the week. It also should give you context for why we are doing things, and how it all fits together (so it is part of the “content” for the course).

Usually, I make this posting on Friday (before the week), but this is not a normal week. And this isn’t a normal week-in-vis posting.

If you are just getting started, the most important things to know:

• If you haven’t read What Is This Class and Why? page you should.
• Understand the Communications policy to know what there is beyond this web page.
• There are required Lectures (Class Meetings).
• There are some non-standard Requirements (Things you Need for Class), but you don’t need to buy Books.
• Look over the class Policies, in particular understand the The Weekly Rhythm of the class.
• Understand the different Parts of Class.
• Take some time to set up the Tools for Class you will need for class. There are hints for Canvas and Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (BBCU)
• Look at the Schedule to get a sense of what will happen this semester (at least what is scheduled so far).
• You may want to know why is this class is online?
• And then look at The Week in Vis 01 (Mon, Aug 31-Fri, Sep 4): What is Visualization? to see what’s happening the first week!