Reading 5: Abstraction

by Mike Gleicher on February 2, 2017

Due: Monday, February 13th before class

Remember, the design school readings are also happening this week. (link to assignment)

Please read:

  1. Chapter 2 Data Abstraction in Munzner (link)
  2. Chapter 3 Task Abstraction in Munzner (link)

Late addition: While Munzner Chapter 2 is pretty thorough, it skips a key concept: level of measurement for quantitative scales. You might have learned this in a stats class, but please understand the difference between “scale types” (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio). Here are some web pages that will quickly give you the concept (this is based on a quick google search):

The third reading (less to read than to look at) is something that just has a bunch of visualization types (for the assignment, you will be asked to think about how different visualization types connect to different data and tasks).

Some things to look at:

The idea for these is just to look through to see lots of different “standard” designs.

Previous post:

Next post: