This is the course website for CS444, Data Visualization.
Welcome to CS444, Data Visualization. In this course, you will learn how, and why, to create data visualizations. Please read the syllabus carefully, and contact the instructor should you have any questions about its content.
A “visualization” is simply a visual representation of an object of our interest. It’s visual: we consume them with our eyes, and so it is essential that we know how our eyes work — and, more importantly, the parts of our brains connected to our eyes. It’s also a representation; we get to choose what this representation will be, and different choices lead to different pictures, some good and some bad. We will learn how to tell those apart, and how to make pictures that are more good than bad.
Good data visualization involves perceptual psychology, mathematics, and computer science. This makes our subject uniquely challenging: sometimes the way our eyes work stands in way of applying some beautiful result from computer science. Sometimes it’s the other way around: something deep about the math in the data will help guide the design process and let us make a picture that is beautiful, informative, and truthful.
The content of the course is split roughly in three distinct aspects: mechanics, principles, and techniques.
The syllabus for the course is available here.
Intro | Aug 23 | Introduction | slides |
---|---|---|---|
Mechanics | Aug 25 | HTML/CSS/SVG Basics | no slides |
Aug 30 | Javascript Basics | no slides | |
Sep 1 | Javascript + DOM, SVG | no slides | |
Sep 6 | d3 intro | no slides | |
Sep 8 | d3 joins and scales | no slides | |
Principles | Sep 13 | Color vision | slides |
Sep 15 | Color vision | slides | |
Sep 20 | Other perceptual channels | slides | |
Assignment 3 discussion | |||
Sep 22 | Other perceptual channels | slides | |
Sep 27 | Assignment 4 discussion | ||
Interaction | slides | ||
Sep 29 | Design Criticism, Algebraic Design | slides | |
Techniques | Oct 4 | Basic Spatial Arrangements | slides |
Oct 6 | cont’d. | ||
Oct 11 | High-Dimensional Data | slides | |
Oct 13 | High-Dimensional Data | ||
Review | Oct 20 | Review | slides |
Oct 25 | MIDTERM | ||
Oct 27 | Class canceled (VIS 2016) | ||
Nov 1st | Hierarchies | slides | |
Nov 3rd | Graphs | slides | |
Nov 8th | Graphs+Spatial Data | slides | |
Nov 10th | Spatial Data | slides, slides 2 | |
Nov 15th | Spatial Data | slides 2 | |
Topics | Nov 17th | Cartography | slides |
Nov 22nd | Large Data | slides | |
Nov 24th | Thanksgiving, no class | ||
Nov 29th | Putting it all together | ||
Dec 1st | The Human Side of Data | ||
Dec 6th | Retrospective, Review | slides |