The Week in Vis: Week 05 (Sep 30-Oct 4)

in Weeks in Vis

This is an unusual week in many ways. The reading (and discussion/seek-and-find) topic is implementation - which is a weird topic since there’s a choose-your-own adventure aspect to it. Everyone has different needs and interests on this one.

But to make things even more unusual, I will be out of town for the class periods. On Monday, we’ll have a guest lecture (Prof. Karen Schloss of the Department of Psychology), and we’ll also have an ICE. On Wednesday, we’ll have a full-period ICE (led by Cat).

Remainders from last Friday (9/27): Discussion 04, Seek and Find 04, DE04: Pictures from Data

The Readings05: Implementation will explain how we will learn about implementation. The posting is a reading unto itself. Part of the “reading” is a “watching” - a recorded guest lecture from when Prof. Dominik Moritz (from CMU) gave a guest lecture in class in 2020. It’s a bit low-fi (we were just learning how to do remote stuff), but the content is amazing. We’ll follow up the following week with an in-real-life lecture (from me) trying it together.

On Monday, we’ll have a real, in-person guest lecture: Prof. Karen Schloss from the Department of Psychology. Karen is an expert on the human perception of color, and applies that deep understanding to visualization. We won’t get to talking about color until later in the semester, but I thought it would be useful for you to hear from Karen now (earlier in the semester) to see a great connection between the “science” of how we understand human vision and the practice of making visualizations. We’ll also have an in-class exercise connected to the design exercise.

On Wednesday, we’ll have an in-class exercise. I won’t tell you much about it. Except that I’ve been doing it since 2015. Last edition of the class, the TA adapted it to make it more relevant to UW students.

This week we have both Class Survey 05: Class Mechanics Check-In (due Mon, Sep 30) and Content Survey 05: A Mixed Week... (due Wed, Oct 02). We’ve moved the content survey later in the week. I didn’t move the class survey - but there is no penalty for turning it in late before Friday 10/4. (I want to have the results to look at over the weekend).

As usual, there is a Discussion and a Seek and Find. And you should be discussing.

There is also a design exercise. DE05: Stories from Data (EDA) asks you to make visualizations from the Census Data. Maybe I should say “more” (since you’ve already made some). A hint… DE06: One Data Set, Four Stories (Census Data Edition) will ask you to make even more. If you turn in DE05 on time, we will get you some feedback so that you can improve what you do for DE06.