Weeks in Vis

We’ve made it to the last week!

We’re getting close to the end. Hopefully, your project is coming along well. Expect all the details for the final expectations soon.

In terms of content… This week is scheduled for two/three very different topics: Scientific Visualization, 3D and Uncertainty Visualization. Scientific Visualization is a whole field unto itself - I can’t teach a Vis course without giving you at least a taste of what its about. 3D comes up a lot in SciVis (and elsewhere). And Uncertainty comes up pretty much everywhere when we work with data - whether we acknowledge it or not.

Last week was an unusual week because it was Thanksgiving. This week is unnusual because we have leftovers from last week. The topic for discussion is Evaluation - how do we know that a visualization is good?

We’ve made it to Thanksgiving week - which always seems to mark something in the semester. This is a weird week - both because its the holiday (although, Wednesday is not a holiday, so there is class), and that we’re in the midst of Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems).

The topic this week is graphs (as in the “networks” kind). It’s a big topic that we will just touch on. We’ll have a lecture on Monday, and an in-class exercise (with a lecture component) on Wednesday. There is the usual reading and discussion. We’ll allow Seek and Find 12 : Graphs (due Mon, Nov 29) to be after the holiday, and cancel the weekly survey (so there is nothing due on the holiday - you are welcome to do things before the holiday).

We have moved the DC2 deadlines to wednesdays: DC2 Phase 2: Proposal (Design Exercise 9)  (due Wed, Nov 24) and DC2 Phase 3: Formulation (Design Exercise 10).

This week, two big things happen: we really dig in to Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems), and we talk about one of my favorite topics, color.

On Monday, Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems) (Phase 1) is due. The main piece is to pick which problem you are going to work on, but the description gives some details of what we expect.

Project proposals are due at the beginning of next week DC2 Phase 2: Proposal (Design Exercise 9)  (Canvas Wed, Nov 24). That’s a major milestone. Hopefully during the week, you’ll make use of all the resources we have (like online discussions and office hours) to come up with good ideas.

And don’t forget to contribute to the DC2 Readings and Brainstorming discussions.

With color, there are many things I’d like to talk about. But instead, we’ll just touch on a few basics. I might try to do a color exercise in class on Wednesday. Or we might try another experiment in group brainstorming for the project.

This is an action packed week in Visualization… We will cover one of the biggest and most interesting topics: Perception. We are wrapping up past assignments with Design Exercise 7: Paris Apartments (Canvas Mon, Nov 8) and DC1 Redux (Canvas Tue, Nov 9). But we’ll also get started with Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems) with the first phase due next week.

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.

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.

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.