Winter 2005
CS 558: Visualization
Information
- Instructor: Maneesh Agrawala
(maneesh at cs.washington.edu)
- Meeting: CSE 403, Tue-Thu from 10:30-11:50 am
- Schedule : I am updating the schedule
regularly. I'll try to settle on the readings about a week before class.
Announcements
Text
- Envisioning Information, E. Tufte. Cheshire Press, 1990.
-
Your best bet is to order it
online. Please do so soon, since readings will be assigned in the first week
of class.
-
- There will also be weekly readings. Consult the class
schedule for more information.
Description
Visual media
in the form of photographs, 3D renderings, diagrams, sketches, animations,
and film are increasingly generated, manipulated, and transmitted by
computers. Yet the
digital tools for transforming data into visualizations still require
extremely low-level interaction by skilled human designers. As a
result, producing effective visualizations can take hours or days and
consume considerable human effort. In this course we will study how principles and techniques from graphic
design, visual art, perceptual psychology and cognitive science, can be
applied in practice to create effective and useful visualizations. The course is
targeted both towards students interested in using visualization in their own
work, and students interested in building better visualization tools and
systems.
Topics
- The Purpose of Visualization
- Data and Image Models
- Perception and Cognition
- Spatial Layout
- Color Encoding
- Interaction Technique
- Usability and Evaluation
- Conveying Shape and Structure
- Abstraction, Emphasis and Level of Detail
- Animation
Requirements
The course will meet twice a week. The first weekly meeting will consist of a
more general lecture introducing the topics listed above. The 2nd weekly meeting
will be student led presentation of specific papers and demonstrations
related to these topics.
In addition to participating in the discussions,
students taking the class for credit will have to lead one oral presentation,
and complete two short assignments as well as a final project.
History/Acknowledgments
In 2002 I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with
Pat Hanrahan and
several of his students including Tamara Munzner,
Francois Guimbretiere and
Chris Stolte on a version of this class at Stanford. The organization,
assignments and even the webpages for this class are based on that
class as well as a revised version of the class which Pat taught in 2004.
Additional ideas and inspiration come from classes taught by
Tamara Munzner (UBC),
John Stasko (Georgia
Tech.),
and Marti Hearst (Berkeley) on Information Visualization.
