Reading and Discussion 11: Week 11 – Uncertainty

by gleicherapi on August 1, 2017

Initial Posting Due: Tue, Nov 14 at (Canvas Link)

Readings

Since this is the “implementation week” of Design Challenge 2, the reading load is light. Also, because while uncertainty is a critical topic, there is no obvious good reading for it. Last year I gave this whole long list.

This year, all you have to read is this short paper:

  • Boukhelifa, N., & Duke, D. J. (2009). Uncertainty visualization: why might it fail? In Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems – CHI EA ’09 (p. 4051). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1520340.1520616 (ACM – free access on campus or using UW library proxy).

If you want to read more, I recommend these two:

We wrote a paper that deals with a very common case of uncertainty visualization, and one of the most standard visualizations.

  • Correll, M., & Gleicher, M. (2014). Error Bars Considered Harmful: Exploring Alternate Encodings for Mean and Error. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 20(12), 2142–2151. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346298 (web)

The statisticians have a lot to say about how we should think about uncertainty, especially in experiments. This paper gets at many of the issues (it is statisticians explaining to psychologists what they should do).

  • Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (n.d.). Inference by eye: confidence intervals and how to read pictures of data. The American Psychologist, 60(2), 170–80. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.2.170 (pdf)

Online Discussion

Initial Posting Due: Tue, Nov 14 at (Canvas Link)

The main thing this week was Design Challenge 2. But there was also the reading about uncertainty. We’ll discuss both.

For your initial posting (due Tuesday): For DC2 we didn’t consider uncertainty in the data. (well, the assignment didn’t discuss it – maybe you are considering it). What kinds of uncertainty might you have in the multi-line series data? What are some possibilities for displaying it? How might you augment the basic designs?

In a second posting: describe what you are doing for DC2. What tasks are you focusing on? Are you running into any issues?

For discussion, you can either discuss the ideas you came up with for displaying uncertainty in DC2 data, or discuss what is going on with DC2.

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