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IEEE Vis2020 (VisWeek) is the main academic conference for the field of Visualization. This year, it is October October 25-30.

Normally, I have to scramble to figure out how to cover class during VisWeek. This year, since the conference is virtual (online) and free, I am taking you (my class) with me!

As part of class, you are required to “attend” (participate, at least a little). All normal class activities this week (lectures, online discussion, seek and find, survey) will be connected to VisWeek.

You must register for the conference. Go to the web page and click on the “Vis Registration Virtual Assistant”. Registration is free, but you have to register.

Note: The details are still being worked out because the details of how the conference will operate have not been announced yet. So, I am not making specific recommendations of what you should do, or requirements for class, yet.

I have made a set of videos (like a lecture) about TreeMaps. There are 3, roughly 10 minute videos in the class Kaltura MediaSpace Channel.

Back when we were discussing encodings, I had slides about TreeMaps, but I didn’t get to go through them. My intent was to make them as a video lecture - which I have. I broke it into 3 pieces, and added some discussion of some of the algorithmic details.

TreeMaps are a useful visualization design - they are used a lot for showing part whole relationships, especially with hierarchical data. They are also really useful in understanding part/whole encodings and some of the tradeoffs.

• Part 1 - discusses part whole relationships and the kinds of encoding choices we make.
• Part 2 - talks about some of the details of treemap encodings, and why we use treemaps (and maybe why not).
• Part 3 - gets into more details, including design choices and algorithms.

This is another attempt to take a previous in-class design exercise and adapt it for the “work at home” environment of the online class.

The design exercise has two parts: one is to consider how to design glyphs to encode high-dimensional data about restaurants; the second considers how to address a very specific task that involves collections of high dimensional data.

Part 1 of this assignment will be turned in as part of the Tuesday initial posting for Online Discussion 08: Interaction (due Tue, Oct 20). For this part, you will generate a number of glyph designs. We will discuss these in class (probably on Wednesday). Part 2 of the assignment will also be turned in as part of the online discussion for Online Discussion 08: Interaction. In this part, you will develop designs for the “restaurants near a point” problem. We will discuss these solutions in class on Friday.

As discussed on the Grading page there is a qualitative aspect to discussion grading. While your initial posts are checked to make sure they meet the minimum (those grades you’ve been getting), the quality of your postings and participation counts as part of your discussion grade and your participation grade. We also said we won’t look at individual weeks: we’ll try to take a “holistic” view (since some weeks you may have more to say than others).

A downside of this qualitative holistic aspect is that it is hard to provide you with feedback: both in terms of “real” feedback (to help your learning), and “grading feedback” (so you can make sure you are on track to get the grade you want, if you care about such things). But, we will try to give you some feedback.

One thing we will do is provide quantitative measures of your online discussion performance. We emphasize that these are crude estimates and will really read things in determining grades.

I hesitate to even give you the quantitative metrics, because they don’t tell the whole story, and I do not want to imply that they are what we base grades on. However, I think they can be useful feedback.

As an experiment, we will do an “in-class design exercise” as an online discussion (not in lecture time). I described this in class on Friday, October 2nd (see (05-2-Critique-Arrivals.pdf 0.7mb), or you can review the video recording of the lecture).

The goal of this assignment is to get you to integrate thinking of scale and comparison into your visualization design process, and to give you a concrete example to consider the frameworks for comparison and scale. It also is meant to give you practice with a design problem, including discussion and critique around tasks and designs. Design challenge 2 will resemble this exercise.

The specific problem considers lists of arrivals. Two model problems are “when do students arrive in class” and “when are assignments handed in”.

I would like to more actively encourage collaboration in class - especially informal collaboration. This is especially tricky in the remote setting, since some of the best mechanisms for informal collaboration (meeting before after class, running into people in the halls, …) aren’t happening.

There is always a tricky tensions between academic conduct and collaboration. For this class, I want to make the policies encourage collaboration: I trust students to be honest and not abuse collaboration. Collaboration is so valuable, and fragile, that I want to encourage it.

This posting will clarify policies that should help you understand that collaboration is acceptable, and give you some suggestions to encourage it.

Short version: I encourage you to find ways to talk to your classmates to discuss class things (including providing feedback on DC drafts).

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to give individual feedback on Phase 2 of Design Challenge 1. However, here are some common comments on things we saw.

Here are some summaries of Surveys 2-4. These really are giving me some insights on how class is going. I really do read them, and they really do help.

I had read these in a timely fashion, but later realized I never summarized them for you.

And I still “owe” you the video about Treemaps.

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.

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.