838-Assignment: Vis in your field

by Mike Gleicher on April 22, 2015

Initial posting due: Monday May 4, additional discussion through the end of class

Turn-in: 838-Only Assignment on Canvas

Many of you 838 students (especially ones who are not CS students) are engaged in some field of research – probably one where visualization is either used, or needed.

For this discussion, I’d like people to think about how visualization applies in their field.

  1. How can what we learned in class be applied in your field?
  2. Is there some other aspect of visualization that we haven’t gotten to that would have been more useful? (for example, a particular kind of data we didn’t talk about)
  3. Give an example of visualization in your field, and critique it.

For the critique part, please give:

  • A link to a paper (or website) with a visualization that you think is a good example (either of the need, of the current practice, or of people doing a good job). It is totally OK (prefered even) if you have an example from your own work (or your lab’s work) – especially if it leads to a “here’s how I can do better in the future given things we’ve learned in class.”
  • A snapshot of an image of the visualization
  • A brief description of the “science” – what is the visualization about (for those of us who are not-experts). What is the data? What is the visualization trying to say?
  • A critique of the visualization (remember our principles of critique: consider purpose, and what is working, before pointed at what isn’t). What might you improve about it (especially now that you’ve learned something in class)?

If you don’t feel like you have “your field” (for example, if you’re a computer science student who isn’t involved in research): it’s OK to say so, and to pick something from another class (where you have hopefully read a paper that involves some data and visualization). If that fails, you can pick something from this class, or from my work (but that is only a last resort).

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