Weeks in Vis

The last week of the semester…

The big thing is, of course, the project. Instructions for the final handin are at Final Project Handins. Please consider signing up to give an in class presentation.

In class… I will give a “presentation on presentations” on Monday. This is more about the “general skill” of giving presentations, rather than something specific to Vis. On Wednesday, we’ll have some students give presentations. (we only have time for a few presentations)

The last full week of the semester!

In some ways, this is a normal week. We have a big topic (graphs - in the sense of networks, not in the sense of “line graph”). But, since you’re probably deep into the project, we’ll adjust expectations accordingly.

To give you more time to focus on the project, we won’t have an online discussion this week. Instead, use this as an opportunity to contribute to the Project Theme Discussions. Please be careful though: join a group before posting (if you post before joining a group, it goes into a “no-mans-land” where only people who haven’t joined a group can see it).

The week after Thanksgiving… we can sortof get back to a normal schedule.

This topic for this week is Evaluation. I’ll talk about it in lecture on Monday. The readings are important. You can read them before lecture or after (I’ll go through the main points - it’s stuff you will need to see more than once). The readings are very reduced for the project. But, there will be a “Design Excercise” related to both the project and the readings for the following week.

For Wednesday’s lecture, the topic is “the random stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.” It might be more on evaluation. I may talk about 3D and animation - because there is simply no other day to talk about them, and I feel a need to talk about them. Or maybe I’ll talk about the SciVis topics that we simply don’t get time to cover in class, but I feel must be at least mentioned in a Vis class.

In terms of the project: there is a “check in” this week - it’s officially due on Tuesday, but it is OK if you turn it in before Friday Dec 2. That will give you more time to make progress. Note: only one member per team needs to fill out the form, but all team members should do the survey to indicate who is doing the form for them.

It’s Thanksgiving week. The schedule is changed a little. I hope everyone has a good holiday.

This week we have a big topic: color. It seems so central. It seems so basic. But it turns out to be remarkably complex (and important). We can only scratch the surface. But, the amount we’ll do is also constrained by its Thanksgiving week, and the course project is starting (and I want students to focus on that).

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.

Hopefully, everyone is settling into the regular pattern of class. This week (or maybe next week, if you’re reading this at the end of Week 2 - maybe it’s easiest to just say “Week 3”) will be an even more “normal” week in that we have everything in the regular rhythm, as well as our first design exercise due.

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 (September 12-16). Hopefully, you will get used to the Rhythm. This week will follow the “usual” pattern. The week “starts” the Friday before with the “week in Vis”. This weekly message goes out as a Canvas Announcement, but also appears on the course web at The Week in Vis 2 (Sep 12-16): Why Vis?.

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). Each week, it will be posted as a Canvas Announcement. It is also a page on the course web (see The Week in Vis: Week 01).

Usually, I make this posting on Friday (before the week), but this is not a normal week.