The Week in Vis (Sep 19-23): Week 03

in Weeks in Vis

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 week’s driving question is “How do we talk about Visualization / think about Visualization?” - which leads to the question of abstraction - how we consider visualization in general ways.

I phrase the question this way to emphasize a point: we want to use abstraction as a tool to talk about visualization. A big goal is to develop a vocabulary to discuss visualization in a way that is independent of its details. Especially with task abstraction it is easy to get nitpicky about how different people like to define things. Instead, my goal is to develop some shared vocabulary for talking about task and data.

There are two parts here: data abstraction and task abstraction.

Data abstraction is (relatively) straightforward. But there are useful terminology and distinctions that will prove helpful as we start to connect data to visuals.

Task abstraction is much murkier. There is no one right answer. There are many different ways to describe and categorize tasks - many of which will prove useful. From the readings and class activities, hopefully you will get to see many of them.

This week, the main topic will be introduced in the readings. There is a lot to read this week. I am aware of that - but it’s all good and important stuff. Because I want to do a discussion and exercise about critique, we’ll only take one lecture for discussing abstraction. Usually, the basics of data abstraction is easy for people, so we won’t need too much time in class. Class time is better spent practicing critique.

Looking ahead… next week, we’ll spend reading, lectures, and an in-class exercise on encodings - the basic visual building blocks that we construct visualizations from. There is also a design exercise due that is more critique practice: Design Exercise 2: Critique Practice. After this, we’ll be ready to start designing visualizations (yes, design exercise 3 will make you do some of that!).