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.

Here is some advice on making good “figures.” It is targeted towards design exercises, but really, they are advice on how to make good figures generally.

These ideas apply more to places where we are asking you to “tell stories” from data. This starts with DE04. If you’re putting a figure in a paper or a slide, you are telling a story as well.

In this assignment, you will make some visualizations from the Census Data. Actual visualizations based on data (unlike last time when we asked you to sketch). You will turn your assignment in using the Canvas survey Design Exercise 04: Pictures from Data (due Fri, Sep 27)

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 is another regular week. There is no class survey, but we have everything else as “normal”.

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 dig into the Design Exercise and look at some tools

Invitations to our Tableau Cloud instance were sent out after class today.

You should receive an email with subject “You’ve Been Invited to Tableau Cloud” from the server (reghelp@onlinemail.tableau.com). Please accept the invitation and set up your account now. Even though we may not use Tableau until next week.

This is a tutorial on how to get started with Tableau using the Census Data for the Design Exercises. It will walk you through what I did to make a few initial pictures. This will show you some of the quirks of Tableau, and the dataset.

This is an update - especially for those who joined class late (we admitted a lot of students on or after the first day, but we should be done for now). We want everyone to get caught up on the first few assignments as soon as possible. Hopefully, we can get through the mechanics and administrative stuff and focused on learning Visualization!

In our first design exercise (it is DE02 because it is in the second week), we will look at our data set and begin to think about why to visualize it. We’ll also practice critique.