The Weeks in Vis: The Last Weeks

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This posting is meant to give you a sense of what is planned for the last weeks of class (post Thanksgiving). Class is dominated by the project: the design exercises are all parts of the project, and there is something due each week. There are some seek-and-finds, and one online discussion left, but we’ll skip those at the end (to make more time for projects).

Week 13: Evaluation

The topic is important: how do we know that visualizations (or visualization systems or visualization ideas) are good? I used to put it at the beginning of the semester. (inspired by the way that Munzner puts it at the front of her book). Unfortunately, the things we need to know to make visualizations had to come first - so we can make things to evaluate.

Note that there is an online discussion and seek and find this week. And a “design exercise” that is a project check in.

The project check-in is small - it’s a brief check to make sure that teams are actually thinking about their projects. DE11: Project Updates will ask each team to answer a few questions (these questions have more detail on the form):

  1. Describe your group’s idea for your project.
  2. Describe what you expect the artifact(s) that you intend to create for the final hand-in. (beyond the report and video)
  3. What tools are you using (or expecting to use)?
  4. How do you intend to assess whether your solution to the problem is good?

Note: all students must put something in for the survey. It is my intent that the team works together to think about and write the answers, it’s just that one teammate uploads them into Canvas. The other teammates need to tell us whose Canvas response to look at.

Week 14: Graphs

This is another big topic in visualization, that we cannot spend nearly enough time or attention on. Probably we’ll go over the key concepts and do some in-class exercises to enforce those concepts.

Due this week is a “design exercise” that asks you to think about your project in terms of last weeks topics on evaluation.

Week 15: Wrapping Up

For the last week, I’ll do my annual “presentation on presentations” - which is something I’ve done in every grad class I’ve taught since, well… The notes you have to read are from 2011. I think if I re-wrote them today, they wouldn’t be much different.

Everything else, will be focused on the project.

Officially, due before the end of class. Unofficially, there is, um, a no cost extension to be announced.