This is the first of the weekly “Week in Vis” posts – posts that I will make at the beginning of the week to give you a sense of what will be happening.
The main events are available on the Course Schedule (look for the green thing on the menu at the top of the page). But I’ll also repeat it (it’s the same content):
- Mon, Sep 4 : No Class: Labor Day
- Wed, Sep 6 : Class: Intro Day
- Fri, Sep 8 : Class: Kinds & ICE 2 Numbers
- Reading: Week 1 – What is Visualization
- Discussion 1: Getting Started (first post due 09/07)
- Seek and Find 1: Bring Me a Visualization! (due 09/08)
For this first week, we’ll get started by working out some class mechanics and learning a bit about what visualization is. We’ll have the usual weekly stuff (readings, discussions, seek and find) so you can get a sense of what these different assignment types are like (and we can work out the mechanics of using Canvas).
Lectures: Because of Labor Day, our first two lectures are Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday, I’ll introduce my broad view of what visualization is, and the four step process I like to use in thinking about how to do it. On Friday, we’ll have an in class exercise to try the process out on a very simple visualization problem, and we’ll use that to discuss how we will think about visualization in the class.
Readings: Learning your way around the class web page (and Canvas) is one of the things you’ll need to read (which includes getting a sense of what I think Vis is, and how to do it). But there are some other foundational readings designed to get you started, and to introduce you to some of the characters we’ll be learning from.
Discussion: Each week, we will have an online discussion to give you a chance to think about the issues we’re learning, and re-enforce them by discussing them with classmates. For this week, the main thing is to get the mechanics down for having in-class discussions. See this post about discussion assignments in general.
Seek and Find: Each week we will have a Seek and Find assignment to give you a chance to find a visualization in order to see how the ideas we discuss in class end up as practical things in the world. This first one is good practice to make sure you know the rules. See this post for general information about seek and finds.
Learning Goals: Normally, I’ll put the learning goals for the week in the Week in Vis post. But for this week, I’ll point you at the big long list of the whole semester’s goals since there’s a lot of other stuff (before the Week 1 specific goals) that you should look at.
