(Readings and assignments due on date of indicated class. Schedule subject to change.)

Week 1: Tuesday, April 1 Introduction / Data Types and Visual Mappings

Readings

• Introduction, Chapters 1-2, Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis, by Stephen Few, Analytics Press, 2009 (required textbook).
• Chapter 2, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, 2nd ed., by Stephen Few, Analytics Press, 2012 (chapter available on Catalyst site).

Assignments (due by 5pm Tuesday)

• Download and install Tableau before class on Tuesday.
• Post an introduction to the class discussion board following the instructions there.
• Turn in 511 Group Info Form (available on Catalyst site).

Links

• Cars dataset, adapted from the ASA 1983 dataset. (Version used in class exercise.)

Week 2: Tuesday, April 8 Data Encoding / Graphical Excellence and Integrity / How to Critique a Visualization

Readings

• Chapter 3, Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• Chapters 1-2 from Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Tufte. (see Catalyst site for PDF)
• Designing Great Visualizations by Jock Mackinlay at Tableau Software (see Catalyst site for PDF)

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 1, Good and Bad Visualizations

Week 3: Tuesday, April 15 Tableau Tutorial / Exploratory Visual Analysis

Readings

• Chapter 6 from Show Me the Numbers. Few. (see Catalyst site for PDF)
• The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations (pdf), Shneiderman, Proc. IEEE Conference on Visual Languages, Boulder 1996.
• Visual Analysis for Everyone by Pat Hanrahan, Chris Stolte, and Jock Mackinlay at Tableau Software (see Catalyst site for PDF)

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 2, Static Visualization Critique.

Assignments (due 5pm Saturday, April 19)

• Project Proposal

Week 4: Tuesday, April 22Interaction / Visual Perception

Readings

• Chapter 4, Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis, Heer and Shneiderman, 2012 (See Catalyst site for PDF).
• Perception in Visualization (html), C. Healey, 2011.

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 3, Exploratory Data Analysis.

Week 5: Tuesday, April 29 Color and Luminance Contrast / Visual Perception 2 / Guest Lecture by Maureen Stone

Readings

• Chapter 5, Now You See It by Stephen Few
• Expert Color Choices for Presenting Data, Maureen Stone, 2006 (See Catalyst site for PDF)
• The first 4 pages of http://poynton.com/PDFs/ColorFAQ.pdf
• Whisper, Don't Scream: Characterizing Subtle Grids, Bartram & Stone, InfoVis 2007 (See Catalyst site for PDF)

Please install the following 2 apps before class (one has alternate versions for PC/Mac)

• All: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastAnalyser
• PC or Linux: http://code.google.com/p/gpick/
• pre-installed for Mac: DigitalColor Meter, in /Applications/Utilities/DigitalColorMeter

Links (for use with in-class exercises)

• http://vis.stanford.edu/color-names/
• http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/color-name-hpl.html color name experiment
• http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/ some related tools
• http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/
• http://www.color-blindness.com/color-blindness-tests/

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 4, Interactive Visualization Critique.
• Revised Project Proposal

Week 6: Tuesday, May 6 Mid-term Presentations

Readings

• Chapters 6 and 12 from Now You See It
• A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo. Jeff Heer, Michael Bostock, & Vadim Ogrievetsky, CACM June 2010.
• A conversation with Jeff Heer, Martin Wattenberg, & Fernanda Viegas, ACM Queue 2010.
• Wrangler: Interactive Visual Specification of Data Transformation Scripts. Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, Joseph Hellerstein, Jeffrey Heer, CHI 2011.
• Optional: Magic Ink (html), Bret Victor, 2006, pages 1-47 (stop at the section entitled "Designing a design tool")

Assignments

• Mid-term presentations due today (should be uploaded to GoPost no later than 5pm before class)

Week 7: Tuesday, May 13 Multivariate Analysis / Animation / Distortion / 3D in Visualization

Readings

• Now You See It, pp. 143-162 (first half of chapter 7).
• Hans Rosling, Debunking myths about the 'third world.' (Gapminder video), TED conference talk 2006.
• Robertson, Fernandez, Fisher, Lee, and Stasko, Effectiveness of Animation in Trend Visualization (pdf), Proc. IEEE InfoVis 2008.
• Optional: Evaluating the effectiveness of spatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments, Cockburn and McKenzie, CHI 2002.
• Optional: Jeff Heer and George Robertson, Animated Transitions in Statistical Data Graphics (pdf), Proc. IEEE InfoVis 2007.
• Optional: Bay-Wei Chang, David Ungar (ACM, 1995), Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface
• Optional: Andy Cockburn et al. (Computing Surveys, 2009), A Review of Overview+Detail, Zooming, and Focus+Context Interfaces

Links

• Gapminder World interactive vis: http://www.gapminder.org/world/

Week 8: Tuesday, May 20 Visualization Tools: Guest Lecture by Jeff Heer / D3 Workshop / Text Visualization

Readings

• Optional: Protovis: A Graphical Toolkit for Visualization, Michael Bostock, Jeff Heer, IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2009.
• D3: Data-Driven Documents, Michael Bostock, Vadim Ogievetsky, Jeff Heer, IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2011.
• Optional: Search User Interfaces, Chapter 11: Information Visualization for Text Analysis, Marti A. Hearst, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Links

• ggobi
• LA Homicides Heer's d3 example of generalized selection.
• HTML: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp
• CSS: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp
• JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_intro.asp
• D3: http://d3js.org/

Week 9: Tuesday, May 27 Storytelling: Guest Lecture by Jock Mackinlay / Trees and Networks / Collaborative Visualization

Readings

• Robert Kosara and Jock Mackinlay, Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualization (pdf), IEEE Computer, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 44-50, May 2013.
• Jeff Heer and danah boyd, Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks (pdf). Proc. IEEE Infovis 2005.
• Optional: Jeffrey Heer, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Visualization, CACM January 2009.
• Optional: Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer, Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data, Proc. InfoVis 2010.

Links

• treevis.net

Week 10: Tuesday, June 3 Final Project Presentations

Readings

• No readings; work on projects.