Readings
Each module will have required readings in the first two weeks. The first week will have backbone and core readings. The second week will have advanced and experientialmodern and historic readings. Modules will also suggest optional readings.
Page Contents
How are the readings organized?
To make the readings more manageable, I am dividing them into different categories. The motivation is described below. Generally, backbone and core will be assigned in the first week of the module, and advanced and experiential will be assigned in the second.
- backbone - Read this carefully. These are the key pieces of the class - often the things I will write to tell you how they fit into the class. I want you to learn the content the way I want you to learn. Expect questions on the reading survey.
- core - Learn this. These are readings that contain important content that I want you to learn. The important thing is that you learn it; learning it from secondary sources (like AI summaries) is OK as long as you get it. My goal is to provide good summaries of these papers that give you sufficient content for class, and hopefully inspiration to read more. Refer to the originals if you want more depth. Expect questions on the reading survey.
- advanced - Look at this. This is content I want you to know. But realistically, students are only going to invest so much energy in the class. I recommend that you skim the papers or read summaries and dig deeper if you want more. May be useful for the content surveys.
- experiential - Experience this. This is a case where I want you to actually read the original source for the experience of reading the original source. It’s not just about the content: I want you to read the original source. As a “graduate student level” practitioner or researcher, you need practice at reading primary sources. Every module we will have two: of different types. Expect questions on the content surveys.
- historic - old documents. Reading old documents is useful to see where foundational ideas come from, and to extract lessons that are still relevant. However, these papers can be tricky to read because they have different contexts and different styles.
- modern - recent papers. Recent papers show not only the newest advances in the field, but also give the reader exposure to how the field “works”.
- optional - Explore this if you’re interested. These are suggestions if you want to go further into a topic, or see some papers that I liked that I simply cannot fit into class.
- resource - Refer to this if you need it. These are recommended things to look at as reference material, such as practical advice for design.
Why a new strategy towards reading?
The Readings, all on one page!
For various reasons, it is useful to have the readings for the semester all on one page - they also appear on the module pages.
Module 0 Welcome: What is Vis?: Week 1
The first required reading is the course web. Make sure that you’ve looked at the Syllabus and Parts of Class and Rubrics to understand how things work. Read What and Why to understand the philosophy of the class. The top of the Readings page will explain how readings work.
The backbone of this week’s reading consists of some tutorials that will give you a lot of my philosophy. You are also required to read two chapters from Alberto Cairo’s The Functional Art and one from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis and Design. Sorry, I don’t have summaries of these yet, you actually have to read them.
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Tutorial 1: What is Vis. Vis Snacks Tutorial 1. (url)
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Tutorial 2: A Simple Example 4 Design Moves on a Table (OBSOLETE). Vis Snacks Tutorial 2. (url) - Note: this really is the “old/obsolete one”. Reading the new tutorial 2 is optional for now. We’ll read it next module.
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Tutorial 3: What is Easy to See?. Vis Snacks Tutorial 3. (url)
- backbone Alberto Cairo. Forms and Functions. Chapter 2 of The Functional Art. (Canvas File) (UW Library) - Note that you are starting with Chapter 2. I recommend starting with the beginning, but that is optional.
- backbone Alberto Cairo. The Beauty Paradox. Chapter 3 of The Functional Art. (Canvas File) (UW Library)
- backbone Tamara Munzner. What's Vis. Chapter 1 from Munzner's Visualization Analysis & Design. (Canvas File) (video) (UW Library) - Munzner’s VAD is the “core textbook” for the class. See Munzner's Book. The introductory chapter gives her philosophy.
See Cairo's Books for a discussion of Cairo’s books. I like them a lot. I really recommend starting reading at the beginning (rather than the required Chapter 2). These are light reading, and highly recommended. I felt like all of the chapters were a bit much to require.
- optional Alberto Cairo. The partnership of presentation and exploration. Preface of The Functional Art. (Canvas File)
- optional Alberto Cairo. Why Visualize: From Information to Wisdom. Chapter 1 of The Functional Art. (Canvas File) (web pdf) (UW Library)
Module 0 Welcome: What is Vis?: Week 2
This week we only have experiential readings: I want you to read these two documents for the experience of reading them. The content survey will ask you about them.
They are weird readings… and this is an experiment. Both readings are long. But they have lots of pictures, and there isn’t much else to do for class.
For the historic reading, we’ll read the first Chapter of Tufte’s first book. This is an important historical document, generally credited as starting the field. Tufte is interesting as a historical character (last week, you read Cairo's discussion of him (FA3)).
For the modern modern reading, we’ll read a recent survey “paper” covering the field. I put paper in quotes because it’s long enough to be considered a book unto itself (80 pages in double spaced format, 50+ in journal form). It’s good practice for reading at a high level: you can’t catch all the details. Get a sense of how science (or, at least, a particular kind of it), can inform visualization.
- historic Eduard Tufte. Graphical Excellence. Chapter 1 of Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. (Canvas File)
- modern Steven Franconeri, Lace Padilla, Priti Shah , Jeffrey Zacks, Jessica Hullman. The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 22 (3)(December 2021). (Canvas File) (doi) (web pdf) (url)
There is an intentional contrast: the Franconeri et al. survey paper specifically focuses on the psychological science - what about visualization can we know from the scientific literature; Tufte generally asserts his opinions as fact without any regard to the actual science (to be far, this writing pre-dates the scientific study of Visualization).
I find it very easy to be negative about Tufte. But (1) there is no denying that he has had a huge impact on the world of Visualization outside of academia; and (2) there are positives to get out of it.
As you read:
- Keep this in context: it was 1983. The Visualization as a subject onto itself did not exist yet.
- Try to notice the negatives (e.g., when he expresses preferences as principles, or doesn’t support his claims).
- Note the positives (e.g., the use of real examples)
- Think of his assertions as “points to consider.” Think about how they might be explored more rigorously.
Module 1 Building Blocks: Week 1
This week, you need to get up to speed on a bunch of the different building blocks we will need for class. There are alot of different pieces to get all at once. And each piece has some amount of reading to go with it.
The main thing is to read a little bit about each of the topics. I tried to make sufficient summaries for each topic. And then you can read more if you’re interested.
My intent was to write tutorials about each of the topics to give you a quick summary. And then you could read more as you had time. However, I didn’t get to actually write the tutorial on encodings - I’ll give you a “Claude-authored” tutorial, but probably you should read the Munzner chapters.
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Tutorial 2: How to Think about Visualization: Building Blocks. Vis Snacks Tutorial 2. (url)
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Tutorial 4: Critique. Vis Snacks Tutorial 4. (url) - read my tutorial to be ready for class. Reading more is optional.
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Data Abstraction Cheat Sheet. Vis Snacks Tutorial. (url) - my summary of the key things. Read it first. Read What: Data Abstraction if there is anything you need more clarity on.
- backbone Michael Gleicher. Task Abstraction: A Crash Course. Vis Snacks Tutorial. (url) - my summary of the key things. Read it, and read more if you are interested - it’s full of pointers.
- backbone Claude (Mike can't take credit). Encodings: Building Blocks for Visualizations. Vis Snacks Tutorial. (url) - this is Claude’s summary of encodings. It’s decent, but I think you should read the two munzner chapters to get the key ideas.
- core Tamara Munzner. Marks and Channels. Chapter 5 from Munzner's Visualization Analysis & Design. (Canvas File) (video) (UW Library) - Munzner covers most of encodings in this chapter.
- core Tamara Munzner. Arrange Tables. Chapter 7 from Munzner's Visualization Analysis & Design. (Canvas File) (UW Library) - Munzner divides layout (position encodings) from all other encodings, so this is a separate chapter
Module 1 Building Blocks: Week 2
For this week, we have 3 experiential readings (sorry, I had to add an extra - but it’s quite light).
One reading is an essay to add to our readings on critique. It’s sortof halfway between historical and modern. It isn’t a paper: it’s an essay. Some context: when they wrote this, the authors were already becoming famous for being the bridge between the academic research community and the practitioner community.
- historic Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. Design and Redesign. Medium Posting. (Canvas File) (url) (Summary) - This essay is really valuable. And it is a case where the document itself is historically interesting, and their examples are worth looking at. This is valuable for seeing how far we’ve come at bringing design to visualization.
The “regular” experiential readings are two papers about Graphical Perception - the “science” of trying to understand encodings empirically.
The key context: the whole field of graphical perception started with a paper by Cleveland and McGill in 1984. There were early perceptual science papers, but this is the first time “visualization researchers” (in scare quotes since in 1984 they wouldn’t have identified themselves this way) tried to do experiments to inform chart design choices.
I am not requiring you to read the original 1984 paper (it is optional). Instead, I want you to read a 2010 paper that reproduces and extends the results, and a more current paper that challenges the paradigm.
- historic Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock. Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design. (doi) (web pdf) (url)
- modern Caitlyn M. McColeman, Fumeng Yang, Steven Franconeri, Timothy F. Brady. Rethinking the Ranks of Visual Channels. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics ( Volume: 28, Issue: 1, January 2022). (doi) (web pdf) (url)
The first paper was one of the earliest examples of using crowd-sources participants for visualization studies - something which is now totally standard practice. Many of us were starting to try it at the time (Detection of Image Stretching was our paper that came out around the same time). But Heer and Bostock really got it in widespread attention.
The second paper is notable not only because of its conclusion and interesting method but also for its statistical modeling and the visualizations they use to convey their results. It’s a great example of visualization applied to visualization research.