CPSC 547: Information Visualization, Sep 2019

Remember to reload the page, changes are frequent

Instructor: Tamara Munzner
First Class: Tue Sep 12 2019
Last Class: Tue Dec 5 2019
Time/Location: Tue 2-5, FSC 2330A
Office Hours: Tue 5-6 after class or by appointment, in X661 ICICS/CS Bldg (X Wing).
UBC Cal Page: CPSC 547
Canvas Page: 547 Canvas Page

Short Weekly Syllabus

  Week

  Date

  Class

1 Sep 10 Intro; Ex: Time Series

2 Sep 17 WhyVis, Data, Tasks, DSM; Ex: Abstractions

3 Sep 24 Validation, Marks & Channels, Rules of Thumb, ArteryViz; Ex: Decoding

4 Oct 1 Tables, Color, D3; Ex: 2N/BR/CP

5 Oct 8 Spatial, Networks, Abyss-Explorer, Geneaology; Pitches

6 Oct 15 Manipulate, Facet, Paramorama

7 Oct 22 No Class on Tue. Fri Oct 25: Present Topics & Groups Finalized

8 Oct 29 Reduce, Embed, Case Studies, TopoFisheye; Guests: Speckmann, Wang. Fri Nov 1: Meetings Cutoff

9 Nov 5 Present 1, Discussion Wrapup & Advanced Topics Mon Nov 4: Proposals Due

10 Nov 12 Present 2, Ex: Ballotmaps

11 Nov 19 Present 3, Peer Project Reviews 1

12 Nov 26 Present 4, Paper Writing and Research Process

13 Dec 4 Present 5, Peer Project Reviews 2

14 Dec 10 Final Presentations 3-7pm; Dec 13 Final Papers due 11:59pm

Detailed Syllabus

Syllabus tentative, final changes will be made by previous class (for readings). Readings should be done before the lecture.

Required Reading:

Visualization Analysis and Design, Tamara Munzner (A K Peters Visualization Series, CRC Press, 2014) is the course textbook.

The UBC library has multiple ebook licenses so you can read it for free: library catalog page, EZProxy direct link.

To buy your own copy online, it's currently US$63 new from amazon.com and on sale for US$67 from CRC (I'll give out promo code for 20% off list price of $84 in lecture, so it's $64); CD$98 from amazon.ca and CD$100 from chapters.ca. When you buy the hardcover book, you'll get the ebook version for free; you can also buy an ebook-only for less.

All additional readings are research papers available online for free, links posted below.

For digital library access from off-campus, use EZproxy with your CWL login through the UBC library.
EZproxy direct links: IEEE DL, Springer DL, ACM DL, JSTOR

Introduction Tue Sep 10

Required Reading

none

Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote

In-Class Exercise: Time Series

Further Reading

Cluster-Calendar paper
Stack Zooming video, paper
ChronoLenses video, paper
RankExplorer video, paper
LiveRAC video, paper

Data, Tasks, DSM Tue Sep 17

Required Reading

VAD Chapter 1. What's Vis, and Why Do It?

VAD Chapter 2. What: Data Abstraction

VAD Chapter 3. Why: Task Abstraction

paper Design Study Methodology: Reflections from the Trenches and the Stacks. Michael Sedlmair, Miriah Meyer, and Tamara Munzner. IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. InfoVis 2012), 18(12):2431-2440, 2012. [type: theory/model]

Discussion: Direct Link

Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote

In-Class Exercise: Abstractions (source: Bertini)

Further Reading

Validation, Marks & Channels, Rules of Thumb, Artery Viz Tue Sep 24

Required Reading

VAD Chapter 4. Validation

VAD Chapter 5. Marks and Channels

VAD Chapter 6. Rules of Thumb

paper Evaluation of Artery Visualizations for Heart Disease Diagnosis. Borkin et al, IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. InfoVis 2011), 17(12):2479-2488, 2011. [type: evaluation / design study]

Canvas Assignment: Direct Link

Slides: Ch 4/5/6/Artery pdf, pdf 16up, keynote
Slides: ArteryViz backup slides pdf, pdf 16up

In-Class Exercise: Decoding (source: Bertini)

Links from Discussion:

Data Sketches extensive process notes including sketching and prototyping tool choices
Quantifying Space Efficiency in 2D

Further Reading

Tables, Color, D3 Tue Oct 1

Required Reading

VAD Chapter 7. Arrange Tables

VAD Chapter 10. Map Color and Other Channels

paper D3: Data-Driven Documents. Michael Bostock, Vadim Ogievetsky, Jeffrey Heer. IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2011. [type: system]

Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote

Canvas Assignment: Direct Link

In-Class Exercise: 2Nums, Bars/Radar, Color (source: Pfister/Lex/Ortiz; Hearst; Rheingans)

Pointers from Discussion

Fat Fonts, combining cognitive numerals with perceptual "density"
Colorgorical demo & Colorgorical paper, combining perceptual and name distance for colors

Further Reading

D3
- D3.js A powerful JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data
- Interactive Data Visualization for the Web - An Introduction to Designing with D3 by Scott Murray (2nd edition, D3 v4)
- Technology fundamentals for D3.js (Slides by K. Wongsuphasawat, J. Hoffswell, D. Moritz)
- Intro to D3
- See the resource page for a longer discussion of readings for D3 (and a few other tools as well). You should use the upcoming week-long pause without classes to put some time into exploring options for what coding infrastructure to use.
Ch 7 (Table Data) Further Reading
Ch 10 (Color) Further Reading

Spatial Data, Networks, Abyss-Explorer, Geneaology Tue Oct 8

Required Reading

VAD Chapter 8. Arrange Spatial Data

VAD Chapter 9. Arrange Networks

paper ABySS-Explorer: visualizing genome sequence assemblies.. Cydney B. Nielsen, Shaun D. Jackman, Inanc Birol, Steven J.M. Jones. TVCG 15(6):881-8, 2009 (Proc. InfoVis 2009). [type: design study]
paper Interactive Visualization of Genealogical Graphs. Michael J. McGuffin, Ravin Balakrishnan. Proc. InfoVis 2005, pp 17-24. [type: technique]
- video

Canvas Assignment: Direct Link

Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote

In-Class: Project Pitches: PDF, PDF 16up

Further Reading

Manipulate, Facet, Paramorama Tue Oct 15

Required Reading

VAD Chapter 11. Manipulate View

VAD Chapter 12. Facet into Multiple Views

paper Visualization of Parameter Space for Image Analysis. A. Johannes Pretorius, Roy A. Ruddle, Mark-Anthony Bray, Anne E. Carpenter. TVCG 12(17):2402-2411 2011 (Proc. InfoVis 2011). [type: design study]

Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote

Canvas Assignment: Direct Link

Further Readings

Reduce, Embed, Case Studies, TopoFisheye Views Tue Oct 29

Required Reading

VAD Chapter 13. Reduce Items and Attributes

VAD Chapter 14. Embed: Focus+Context

Paper: Topological Fisheye Views for Visualizing Large Graphs, Emden Gansner, Yehuda Koren and Stephen North. IEEE TVCG 11(4):457-468, 2005. [type: algorithm]

Canvas Assignment: Direct Link

Guest Lectures: Bettina Speckmann on Necklaces and Flows: Algorithms for Automated Cartography; Yang Wang on Architecting Visualizations at Scale.

Slides: (Example Presentation & Proposals) pdf, pdf 16up, keynote

Further Readings

Presentations 1 Tue Nov 5

Frances Sin, color
Color Crafting: Automating the Construction of Designer Quality Color Ramps. Stephen Smart, Keke Wu, Danielle Albers Szafir. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up
Yang (Julia) Zhu, color
The Effect of Color Scales on Climate Scientists' Objective and Subjective Performance in Spatial Data Analysis Tasks. Aritra Dasgupta, Jorge Poco, Bernice Rogowitz, Kyungsik Han, Enrico Bertini, Claudio T. Silva. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up
Jerry Yin, color
Measuring and Modeling the Feature Detection Threshold Functions of Colormaps. Colin Ware, Terece L. Turton, Roxana Bujack, Francesca Samsel, Piyush Shrivastava, David H. Rogers. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up
Gabriel Zhou, perception
Biased Average Position Estimates in Line and Bar Graphs: Underestimation, Overestimation, and Perceptual Pull. Cindy Xiong, Cristina R Ceja, Casimir Ludwig, Steven Franconeri. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up
Tiffany Quon, personal data
LightGuider: Guiding Interactive Lighting Design using Suggestions, Provenance, and Quality Visualization. Andreas Walch, Michael Schwärzler, Christian Luksch, Elmar Eisemann, Theresia Gschwandtner. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up
Junfeng Xu, cartography
A Visual Analytics System for Exploring, Monitoring, and Forecasting Road Traffic Congestion. Chunggi Lee, Yeonjun Kim, Seungmin Jin, Dongmin Kim, Ross Maciejewski, David Ebert, Sungahn Ko. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up
Lucas Zamprogno, software engineering
Inviwo - A Visualization System with Usage Abstraction Levels. Daniel Jönsson, Peter Steneteg, Erik Sundén, Rickard Englund, Sathish Kottravel, Martin Falk, Ingrid Hotz, Anders Ynnerman, Timo Ropinski. TVCG (Proc. VAST/InfoVis/SciVis 2019 Special Issue).
- Slides: pdf, pdf 16up