Online Discussion Grades

by Mike Gleicher on September 28, 2019

After a bit of a delay, we are starting to post grades for online discussions (Online Discussions and Seek and Finds) to Canvas.

All grades appear as if they are coming from me – but they are really coming from my script (that authenticates as me), whether it is Adita or me who does the grading.

Online Discusions and Seek and Finds are graded on an A-F scale (90=A, 80=B, …).

The grades are for your initial discussion only, and do not include any penalties for being late. We will assess these things at the end of the semester.

DC1 Peer Review

by Mike Gleicher on September 28, 2019

The final phase of Design Challenge 1 is Peer Review. Each student must provide 3 critiques of other students’ assignments. Note: the critiques themselves will be graded. The critiques are not for grading the designs. We are looking to see that students understand how to assess designs, and to give critique in a constructive manner.

How this will work:

  1. The course staff will choose a design from each student who has turned in an assignment in a timely fashion.
  2. We will assign each design a number, and place them all in a Canvas file folder directory – which is accessible as this link. (there will be approximately 60 PDF files with designs named 01.pdf, 02.pdf etc.). If you followed instructions, your name will not be in your design, so critics will not know who you are.
  3. We will send each student an “assignment” of 3 different numbers where we have randomly chosen 3 designs for you to critique. We will try to avoid assigning people their own design, but let us know if we goof. We plan to do this by email on Friday, October 4th. If you do not receive your assignment by Sunday, October 6th, please send a note to Aditya.
  4. If you want to critique more than 3 designs, we will also provide you with 3 extra numbers. Please do the 3 assigned ones first. We will only grade the assigned critiques, but you may want to provide feedback for your classmates. You are also welcome to look through as many designs as you want.
  5. You can get the PDFs for the designs you need to critique by looking in the directory (see #3).
  6. Enter your critiques in this google form HERE. Please do not identify yourself in the body of the critique (but put your WISC email address and name in the form entries for those things). The form will ask you which design you are critiquing.
  7. After the assignment is due, we will release all critiques (without any name information, but with the number of the design they are critiquing). This way, you can look for the critiques of your design (we will tell you which designs are yours). You can also look for other critiques of the designs that you critiqued (to compare how good your critique was). If you want, you can read any, or all of the critiques.
  8. The course staff will grade the 3 critiques you wrote and assign a grade and post it on Canvas. We will assign an A-F grade.

If all goes according to plan, we will have a “double blind” review process where each student provides 3 reviews and should receives 3 reviews.

If you turn in your DC1 Phase 3 late, your designs may not get critiqued. You still must do critiques.

Because we won’t be able to get the designs out to people for critique until Friday, October 4th (at the earliest), we are making the due date for critiques Friday, October 11th (rather than the usual design challenge due date of Wednesday).

The Week in Vis 05 (Mon, Sep 30 – Fri, Oct 4): Implementation

by Mike Gleicher on September 27, 2019

Week in Vis 5 Mon, Sep 30-Fri, Oct 4

This week, we’ll talk about how to make visualizations. The readings focus on some very “cutting-edge” CS stuff, but in class we’ll take a more broad view.

Also, Design Challenge 1 (the main part) is due – the last part (peer review) will come out at the end of the week. (you can’t do it until you turn in your designs – we can’t peer critique if we don’t have designs to critique)

Readings for the Week

Reading about implementation is hard: everyone is likely to want to use a different tool, and for any tool, the best documentation is a moving target. What I really want to teach you is not any particular tool, but to give you a sense of what’s available and how you might choose amongst them. That’s what we’ll talk about in lecture.

From other parts of class, you’re (hopefully) already experienced Tableau (an end-user tool). In the past, we’ve taught people about D3 (since it’s what many people use to make visualizations on the web), but actually using D3 requires being an expert web programmer (see my 2015 rant about how hard it is for students to learn D3), and the ideas in D3 are too low-level to be instructive for other things. We’ll talk about the key ideas in class. You won’t be required to learn about D3, but you might want to learn about D3 for projects (especially if you think you’ll want to make web-based visualizations in the future).

For the reading, I want you to learn about a more research oriented tool (Vega-Lite) that is valuable to learn about because it really illustrates the concepts we emphasize in class. The goal is not for you all to become Vega-Lite users (although you might want to), but to see enough about it that you can appreciate its ideas.

The “reading” for Vega-Lite is to do the first 3 “Chapters” of the UW Visualization Curriculum. (UW is the other UW, not us). I strongly recommend that you watch the video first (its also linked in chapter 1).

Vega-Lite can either be used from Python (using a binding library called “Altair”), or directly inside of web pages. There are correspondingly, two versions of the curriculum. If you’re a Python programmer, choose the “Altair” version (you can either download the notebook, or run it online in “Colab”). If you prefer JavaScript or aren’t already a Python expert, use the “Obervable” version. There isn’t really any JavaScript programming involved.

Optional

More on Vega-Lite: If you’re curious, you can also look at the academic paper about Vega-Lite:

D3: To learn about the ideas of D3, the D3 paper is an important starting point. It’s the “academic document” that tries to explain why D3 is what it is, and why it’s a good idea. It’s a weird mix of an academic CS paper, with lots of specific implementation details (which are less common in academic CS papers). The paper really is the best way to get the rationale and the key ideas, you just have to skip over a lot of acronyms and buzz-words. It is not a way to learn how to use D3.

To learn how to use D3, there are countless tutorials around the web. Aditya (the TA) can make current suggestions. All the ones I used to recommend are out of date.

The Future: The Draco system takes Vega-Lite a step farther: automating a lot of the decision making in visualization design by encapsulating design knowledge. See the (award winning) paper.

Optional Things

by Mike Gleicher on September 25, 2019

There will be an optional “Class” on Friday, September 27th. This is an informal time for me to meet students. There is no agenda, we’ll just chat.

Aditya will hold office hours to help people with DC1 (or anything else class related) on Thursday Sep 26, 2pm-3pm in 1307CS.

He will also hold an “office hour” on Monday September 30th before class in the class room (from 10-11).

Policy on Religous Observances

by Mike Gleicher on September 22, 2019

This came up (indirectly) in a question from a student…

The University has policies about class absences for religious observances (see here and here).

Scheduled classes (lectures and ICEs) are mandatory for this class (CS765). However, if a student informs the course staff, we will make an alternate assignment available. Note: this applies only to religious observances. We take all claims of religious observances at face value. The University policy is that students must inform the course staff at the beginning of the semester, however, for CS765 we will accept one weeks notice.

The Week in Vis 04 (Mon, Sep 23 – Fri, Sep 27): Encodings

by Mike Gleicher on September 21, 2019

Week in Vis 4 Mon, Sep 23-Fri, Sep 27

Hopefully, we are now on a standard schedule: each week has the same rhythm. There is a design challenge piece due this week. Don’t forget about online discussions – they stay open for a while after the initial postings are due so you can discuss things with your “group”.

The topic for this week is encodings: what are those visual variables that we can tie to different data. We’ll look at the list and try to understand how we might choose. The readings will help with that, including an entry point to the “science” that can inform our decisions. The in-class design exercise will combine this with more practice with standard chart types (to help with the design challenge).

For Friday, we will have an optional “class”. I’ll be in the class room (in Wendt), to talk to students. I will not have anything planned. I was hoping to use this as a chance to get to know some people, but I am also happy to answer questions that people bring.

Readings for the Week

This week, the topic is Encodings. The Visual channels to which we can map data. These can be thought of as the building blocks from which visualizations are constructed. We’ll read about different encodings, and hopefully get a sense of why you might choose one over the other. And you’ll look at some standard designs and try to understand how they are put together from encodings.

The primary readings are three chapters that discuss the different encodings, and a classic paper they all refer to:

  1. Marks and Channels (Chapter 5 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-05-MarksAndChannels.pdf 0.4mb)A nice discussion of the main encodings, with information of how they differ and how to choose.
  2. Arrange Tables (Chapter 7 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-07-ArrangeTables.pdf 0.6mb)Position encodings are extra important and potentially more complex, so they get their own chapter. This chapter is particularly interesting because Munzner shows us how to break down a lot of standard (and some not so standard) charts into basic encodings. (note that we’ve skipped over Chapters 4 and 6 – we’ll come back to these).
  3. Basic Principles of Visualization (Chapter 5 of The Truthful Art) (theTruthfulArtCh5.pdf 10.2mb)In some ways, this is redundant with Munzner – but I like it as a different perspective, less formal and academic. It provides some thoughts on how to make practical use of the research literature (which we will look at).
  4. Cleveland and McGill. Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data. Science 229(4716), 1985. (online library) (ClevelandMcGill85.pdf 1.3mb)This paper is referred to by Munzner, Cairo, and, well, everyone else. It’s the first rigorous attempt to understand how people perform at reading encodings. I think it’s important to see the original paper, so you know what they are talking about.There are many more recent papers that continue the tradition of trying to rigorously and empirically determine what works and doesn’t work. It’s become a whole genre. We’ll see more when we talk about evaluation and perception. See Heer&Bostock (optional, below) for a more modern take on this paper.

Optional:

Tableau Online

by Aditya Barve on September 20, 2019

You should have the necessary permissions to use Tableau Online for DC1.

Here are some learning resources:

  1. Tableau’s official training videos – the 28 minute series “Why is Tableau doing that?” is particularly useful to understand Tableau’s internal design decisions
  2. A crisp textual tutorial to help you dig into specific features

Typo on due dates…

by Mike Gleicher on September 18, 2019

We are aware there was a typo on the “Week in Vis” sidebar saying that the initial posting for the Online Discussion was due on today (Wednesday) not yesterday (Tuesday, when it should be due). We’ll use the later date – don’t worry if Canvas tells you otherwise.

Forgot art supplies in class on Wed?

by Aditya Barve on September 18, 2019

It seems someone forgot their art supplies in class today. They are placed on the lecturer’s table at the head of the class.

Design Challenge 1 – Datasets

by Aditya Barve on September 16, 2019

These are the three choices for data sets for Design Challenge 1. The first choice has three options.

Airline On-Time Performance

These data sets comes from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Each data set contains data about 40,000 flights from 2019. Refer to this page for explanations of all the fields and look up tables which describe what the codes mean. You may use one of these three variants:

  1. 40k flights from January (download dataset)
  2. 20k flights each from January and February (download dataset)
  3. 10k flights each from January to April (download dataset)

Census Data by County (download dataset)

Socioeconomic indicators like poverty rates, population change, unemployment rates, and education levels vary geographically across U.S. States and counties. This data set combines data from these topics into a single file. See documentation on the constituent data sets.

Beijing Air Quality and Weather (download dataset)

Data about Beijing air quality and weather has been joined into a single cohesive table.

The air quality data describes the concentration of air pollutants measured in microgram per cubic meter. Multiple samples were measured for each day, and the fields recorded are statistical summaries of the pollutant distribution. For example, “Upper95Pollution” is the 95th upper percentile, or the top 5%.

The weather data comes from Weather Underground.

This data set was contributed by Brad Stieber, a past CS765 student.

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