Resources

Other Infovis Courses

Examples of Interactive Visualization Systems

Data Visualization and Analysis Software and Toolkits

    Visualization Toolkits

  • d3 - JavaScript data visualization toolkit
  • Prefuse - Visualization toolkit for Java
  • Flare - Visualization toolkit for Adobe Flash
  • Processing - Graphics and interaction language and IDE
  • Protovis - JavaScript visualization language, predecessor of d3
  • jQuery, Dojo, Google Maps API - helpful HTML/Javascript/XML libraries
  • Tableau for Students - get Tableau free license as a student
  • Tableau Public - free version of Tableau which publishes to the web
  • PolyMaps - map displays with JavaScript & SVG
  • Weave - web-based visualization platform
  • Modest Maps - Mapping library for Flash
  • Improvise - Java system supporting coordinated views
  • ManyEyes - collaborative visualization from IBM

    Color Tools

  • ColorBrewer - a tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics
  • NASA Ames Color Tool - a tool designed to provide the designer with views of the perceptual relationships among the possible color choices
  • Scientific Visualization and Graphing Tools

  • VTK - scientific visualization library (C++ with wrappers for other languages)
  • VisIt - parallel interactive scientific visualization
  • GGplot2 - graphics language for R
  • GGobi - visualizations for multivariate data
  • Commercial and Older Products

  • TreeMap - treemap software from UMD HCIL
  • TimeSearcher - interface for time-series data from UMD HCIL
  • Piccolo - A Java library for zoomable UIs, from the University of Maryland (Java and .NET)
  • Other products - from UMD HCIL
  • TreeMap software from the Hive Group - commercial product
  • Thinkmap SDK, and some examples - commercial product
  • The Infovis Toolkit - Java visualization toolkit from INRIA (2005)
  • The Rivet Toolkit - visualizing complex systems
  • Polaris Project - precursor of Tableau

Other Visualization Resources Pages

Color

Data Sets

Infovis Collections and Commentary

Relevant Books, Journals, and Other Publications

Infovis Overviews

Perceptual and Psychological Principles

  • Colin Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 3rd ed., Morgan Kaufmann 2012.
  • Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology , MIT Press, 1999.
  • Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and Mind , Harvard University Press, 1986.

Graphic Design in Infovis

  • Stephen Few's site, Perceptual Edge, as well as his books, Show Me the Numbers and Information Dashboard Design. We will use Now You See It as a textbook for this course.

  • Stephen Kosslyn, Elements of Graph Design, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1993.

    Kosslyn is more like a cookbook or how-to guide and should be useful for people not very experienced with making graphs (although I think it is useful even if you are experienced; it puts a lot of your implicit knowledge explicitly in one place). Although it is light on the scientific justifications, it is written by a cognitive psychologist with considerable experience in the field.

  • Maureen Stone, A Field Guide to Digital Color, A.K. Peters, 2003.

Information Visualization Research

Classics

Interesting Visualizations