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

Week 1: Thursday, Jan 9 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, Simple Statistics, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, 2nd ed., by Stephen Few, Analytics Press, 2012 (chapter available on class Canvas site; read only if you need a refresher on very basic statistics).

Assignments (due by 5pm Thursday, Jan 9)

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

Links

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

Week 2: Thursday, Jan 16 Tableau Tutorial: Guest Lecture by Blair Hutchinson / Data Encoding / How to Critique a Visualization

Readings

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

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 1, Good and Bad Visualizations

Week 3: Thursday, Jan 23 Graphical Excellence and Integrity / Exploratory Visual Analysis / Data Cleaning

Readings

• Chapter 4, "Analytical Interaction and Navigation," Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• Chapter 6 from Show Me the Numbers. Few. (see Canvas 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 Canvas site for PDF)
• Wrangler: Interactive Visual Specification of Data Transformation Scripts. Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, Joseph Hellerstein, Jeffrey Heer, CHI 2011.

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 2, Static Visualization Critique.

Assignments (see Canvas site for due date)

• Project Proposal

Links

• Tableau Training Videos (Links to an external site)

Week 4: Thursday, Jan 30Color

Readings (Color)

• Expert Color Choices for Presenting Data, Maureen Stone, 2006 (See Canvas 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 Canvas site for PDF)

Links (Color)

• Color Contrast Analyzer: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastAnalyser
• Color pickers with CIELAB:
  PC or Linux: http://code.google.com/p/gpick/
  Pre-installed for Mac: DigitalColor Meter, in /Applications/Utilities/DigitalColorMeter
• http://vis.stanford.edu/color-names/
• http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/
• http://www.color-blindness.com/color-blindness-tests/
• Color Vision Deficiency (CVD) tool
• CVD simulator
• Vision Simulator
• Color Brewer tool

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Color Exercises (see Canvas for details)

Assignments (see Canvas site for due date)

• Revised Project Proposal

Week 5: Thursday, Feb 6 Interaction / Visual Perception Part I

Readings

• Chapter 5, "Analytical Techniques and Practices," Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis, Heer and Shneiderman, 2012 (See Canvas site for PDF).
• Perception in Visualization (html), C. Healey, 2011.

Assignments (due by midnight before class)

• Assignment 3, Exploratory Data Analysis

Week 6: Thursday, Feb 13 Mid-term Presentations

Readings

• Chapter 6, "Analytical Patterns," Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• 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.
• 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 no later than 5pm before class)

Week 7: Thursday, Feb 20 Visual Perception Part II / Multivariate Analysis / Animation / Distortion

Readings

• Chapter 7, "Time Series Analysis," pp. 143-162 (first half of chapter), Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• Chapter 12, "Multivariate Analysis," Now You See It, by Stephen Few
• 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: 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: Thursday, Feb 27 3D in Visualization / Text Visualization

Readings

• Search User Interfaces, Chapter 11: Information Visualization for Text Analysis, Marti A. Hearst, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Optional: Evaluating the effectiveness of spatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments, Cockburn and McKenzie, CHI 2002.

Week 9: Thursday, Mar 5 Trees and Networks / Storytelling / 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: Thursday, Mar 12 Final Project Presentations

Readings

• No readings; work on projects.

Assignments

• Upload presentation before 5pm on the day of class.
• Presentations to be given in class today 6-9:50pm.
• Final Project Writeups (see Canvas for due date).