This is the course website for CS444, Data Visualization.
Welcome to CSC444, 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 learn 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.
| Date | Topic | Materials | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intro | 08/21 | Introduction | slides |
| Mechanics | 08/23 | HTML/CSS/SVG Basics | no slides |
| 08/28 | Javascript Basics | no slides | |
| 08/30 | Javascript + DOM, SVG | A2 no slides | |
| 09/04 | d3 intro | no slides | |
| 09/06 | d3 joins and scales | A3 no slides | |
| Principles | Color vision | slides | |
| 09/11 | Color vision | slides | |
| 09/13 | Other perceptual channels | A4 slides | |
| 09/18 | Other perceptual channels | slides | |
| 09/20 | Interaction | A5 slides | |
| 09/27 | Design Criticism, Algebraic Design | slides | |
| Techniques | 10/04 | Basic Spatial Arrangements | A6 slides |
| 10/09 | cont’d. | ||
| 10/11 | High-Dimensional Data | slides MDS article PCA article | |
| 10/16 | Hierarchies | slides | |
| 10/18 | Review | slides | |
| 10/23 | MIDTERM | ||
| 11/25 | Graphs | slides | |
| 10/30 | Spatial Data | slides | |
| 11/01 | Spatial Data | slides, slides 2 | |
| 11/06 | Spatial Data | slides 2 | |
| Topics | 11/13 | Cartography | slides |
| 11/15 | Large Data | slides | |
| Putting it all together | |||
| 11/29 | The Human Side of Data | slides | |
| 12/04 | Retrospective, Review | slides |