This week was supposed to be color week. We’ll put that off so we can do things that are timely and relevant to the Design Exercise / Projects: we’ll talk about design, and you’ll read about uncertainty. And in class, we’ll do some brainstorming about projects and help people find partners and choose topics.

This week we’ll dig into human perception as an important foundation for visualization. We’ll also continue the Time Usage Survey Design Exercise.

This will be a non-standard week because of the Design Exercise: the Tuesday deadline to turn in drafts is strict, and the normal Friday activities will be replaced by doing critiques.

This week, we will turn our attention to interaction (at least in terms of the course content). We are also beginning the first phase of the “time usage survey project” (less a project than a series of design exercises).

This week is a bit of a grab bag of topics. We’ll try to take a step back and ask the question “why does Vis work?” We’ll look at it from the perspective of perception and cognition (going back to the readings that we did not do as part of “Why Vis” in week 2). These will set the stage for our upcoming discussions of perception. We’ll also talk about some statistical issues, which will be relevant as we do exploratory data analysis in Design Exercise 7: Exploratory Data Analysis with the ATUS data.

This week, we’ll look at a different part of scale: scaling in the number of dimensions. The lecture will look at different ways to do this (some of the more traditional ways), and the In Class Exercise will cover a different kind of way to deal with dimensions (glyphs).

We’ll have the final handins for the Aid Data exercise, and move on to some other design exercises.

This week, we’ll explicitly talk about scale: what do we do when the data gets big. This problem is pervasive: we’ve been dealing with it all along, and will continue to deal with it with everything else we talk about. This week, we’ll try to get some vocabulary to talk about the problems and their solutions.

We’ll also be wrapping up the Aid Data Design Exercise. This week you’ll provide feedback to your classmates (and receive feedback), so you can improve your final designs.

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. We’ll use class time to look at the design exercise and to look ahead at some tools you might use to make visualizations.

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.

For the design exercises (and possibly other things), you must at least try Tableau.

Tableau is a commercial data analysis and visualization tool. The company generously provides it for use in classes through the Tableau for Teaching Program.

Here, we will give you a brief guide on how to get started with it, and pointers to some resources. We expect students to figure out how to work with Tableau enough for class.