The Week in Vis: Week 02

in Weeks in Vis

This is our first full week of class (September 9-13). Hopefully, you will get used to the Weekly Rhythm. This week will follow the “usual” pattern. The week “starts” the Friday before with the “week in Vis” (this posting). This weekly message goes out as a Canvas Announcement, but also appears on the course web at The Week in Vis: Week 02.

Hopefully, last week you figured out the basic class mechanics. If you haven’t done last week’s assignments, please do them first. See The Week in Vis: Week 01. For now, we’ll accept things late (since some students joined the class late). After this week we’ll expect you to do things on time.

Last week, we asked the question “What is Visualization?” And my answer was “a picture that helps someone do something.” The follow up question: “Why would you do that?” There’s a simple version of the answer, “because a picture can help that someone do the something.” But that exposes the real why questions: Why can “pictures” help people do things? Why might we think that a picture is a good choice?

Short version: There are things that visualizations are particularly good at doing. And there are perceptual and cognitive reasons why visualizations are good at helping people with tasks. We’ll look at examples of why this is the case, and we’ll need to learn about how we learn from examples.

The work this week will drill deeper into that. We’ll look at some things visualizations can “do” (in terms of helping people with tasks), as well as some of the cognitive and perceptual reasons why they are so good at helping. We should begin to see why visualization can be a good choice (i.e., why choose visualization and not something else). Unfortunately, we won’t get to talk/read about perception and cognition for a bit (too much to read already) - it was too much to cram into a week. Hopefully it will motivate you for topics later in the class.

On Monday in class, we’ll have a more traditional lecture (and maybe have a small in-class exercise) that tries to get at some of the “why vis.”

On Wednesday in class, we’ll talk about (and practice) critique and redesign. Most of the class will be an in-class exercise to practice critique - please read up on it beforehand.

On Friday, a first “Design Exercise” will be due. Since I’ve been slow at getting it organized, it will probably be small. Expect to hear more about it soon.

Remember, like a normal week, there is a Discussion Discussion 02: Why Vis? with an initial posting due on Wednesday and a Seek and Find Seek and Find 02: Why Vis That? due on Friday. There is also both a content survey Content Survey 02: What and Why? and a class survey Class Survey 02: Inventory due on Monday. Yes, we have both in one week.