Archived web site from Fall 2021

The examples from the interaction lecture so we can all try them.

We’re back from VisWeek. I hope everyone enjoyed the conference! Despite the fact that I didn’t have to travel, I still feel that I have a good bit of catching up to do…

The topic for this week is interaction.

It’s VisWeek! We’re going to the conference as a class! See Visweek Instructions for instructions. No lectures. And most class activities are replaced with conference related activities.

As you hopefully know, October 24-29 is “VisWeek” - the IEEE Conference on Visualization.

Hopefully you’ve seen Attending Virtual VisWeek: Get Ready! so that you know to register. This posting has a bit more details. I can only give now that there is more public information about how the conference is run.

This posting describes the class requirements, but also gives you some advice on how to get the most of your VisWeek Experience. I expected to have more to say, but information is scant.

This week, we’ll continue our discussion of scale by talking about a different kind of scale: having too many dimensions.

Design Challenge 1: One Dataset / Four Stories is due at the beginning of the week. We’ll take a pause from it, and come back to do peer reviews later. The other coming attraction is VisWeek. There still isn’t much information available, but you do need to register. Be sure to register and tell us that you’ve registered in the (this is an assignment on Canvas).

This week we will talk about one of the biggest challenges in visualization: dealing with scale. What happens when you have “too much” (data, complexity, …). Our focus will be on learning about general strategies for dealing with scale.

Lectures will integrate some design exercises to understand the choices, as well as some discussion of comparison as a strategy for thinking about visualizations.

And, of course, Design Challenge 1: One Dataset / Four Stories is ongoing. If you haven’t seen it, there are DC1 Hand-in Instructions.

Design Challenge 1: One Dataset / Four Stories will be turned in as a Canvas Quiz (see DC1 Handin: Design Exercise 4 (due Mon, Oct 18)). Unfortunately, Canvas isn’t the most flexible tool for assignment handin, so we want to warn you some things about it.

This week we’ll talk about implementation… how do we make visualizations. In general, we won’t spend too much time on the topic, but I want everyone to see some of the basic strategies. The Readings 05: Implementation will tell you more about the plan (and give you “readings”).

Part of this week is a video - it doesn’t take the place of a lecture, but it serves in the place of a reading. For the design exercise, we’ll use it both as a way to think about Design Challenge 1: One Dataset / Four Stories, and also to motivate some of the problems we’ll discuss in the coming weeks.

This week, we’ll learn about encodings the way we map data to things we see. Encodings give the basics building blocks that we build visualizations from. The key idea is that rather than thinking about chart types, we think about them in terms of building blocks. That way we don’t need to learn zillions of chart types… we learn a few basic building blocks that we can assemble into charts as needed. An advantage to this approach: it lets us reason about why we might make certain choices.

We’re also into Design Challenge 1: the design exercises have you work with Tableau, and this will build up to the assignment that makes you work with real data.

Our second full week of class. Hopefully, you’ve gotten used to to the pattern. This week, we’ll introduce the final piece of class: design exercises and challenges. These will be due on Mondays (so I am warning you about something for the 27th).

The topic for this week is abstraction: how do we talk about data and tasks in general ways. This will allow us to get away from the details of any specific problem, and to transfer our knowledge between problems. It will also allow us to consider general purpose tools. We’ll also talk about critique (which you read about last week).

This is our first full week of class. Hopefully, you will get used to the The Weekly Rhythm. This week will follow the “usual” pattern.

This week, will be a bit of a broad subject intro, and then we’ll get into “design process”.

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.

We will have to adapt class to the situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As I write this (August 31, 2021), things are constantly changing.

But, as of today… we are still scheduled to have in-person lectures, and we are still planning to conduct class in the usual format.

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 Class Meetings (Lectures).
• There are some non-standard Requirements, 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 Canvas
• Look at the Schedule to get a sense of what will happen this semester (at least what is scheduled so far).
• And then look at The Week in Vis: Week 01: Getting Started to see what’s happening the first week!

No, we really don’t start counting at 0, this is the week(s) before class.

Normally, there is a posting each week about what will happen in class during the week to help you get ready for it. This is a bit of a practice for that.