The Week in Vis: Week 04 (Sep 26-30)

in Weeks in Vis

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.

This is a pretty “normal” week - design exercise due, lectures, readings, discussion, seek and find.

The topic of encodings will hopefully help a lot of things come together - we’ll see how the charts we’re so used to looking at (like bar charts and line charts) can be viewed as being built of smaller pieces. We’ll do some design exercises in class to help us explore how these mappings can be altered.

This week, we’ll have the lecture first, and then apply what we learned in lecture in an in-class exercise on Wednesday. You’ll also get to do some actual visualization design in a design exercise soon: the first ones are more practice with thinking about questions visualizations can answer (last week), critique practice (Design Exercise 2: Critique Practice this week). Next week, you’ll design something (if you want to look ahead at Design Exercise 3: A Design Problem due Oct 4, it is there - but it might be easier to do after you’ve learned about encodings).

And if all this isn’t enough… we’re going to ask you to try using Tableau soon. See Tableau and watch for announcements.

With online discussions, seek and finds, and end-of-week surveys: we’re going to start to give you feedback on the earlier ones (yes, we’re behind - but are catching up). You might want to look at the feedback pages (Feedback) that explain what we were looking for, and give some examples of what good and bad answers look like.