The Week in Vis: 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 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

There’s a slightly weird thing with this year’s class rhythm… I am sending out this message on Friday, explaining what is happening next week. But many of you are still wrapping up this week’s assignments. Seek and Find 02: Why Vis That? and Design Exercise 02: Questions from Data are due today. And you should continue discussing this weeks discussions into next week. But we need to keep moving forward, so here is what’s happening next 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.

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.

This weeks’ design exercise DE03: Design Exercise 3: Pictures and Questions will get you to think about the Census Data more, and to start actually designing visualizations.

This week, the main topic will be introduced in the readings - Readings03: Abstraction. 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. We’ll use the time for looking at tools, practicing critique, and talking about the design exercises.