Due Date: preferably before class on Monday, January 30th. You’ll get more from the lecture if you’ve done the reading. The associated discussion has parts due that day. (link to discussion assignment)
In this reading, we’ll explore the “why visualization” question a little bit deeper. Again, we’ll get 3 very different perspectives:
- Chapter 9 of Visual Thinking (course reader [Ware_visual_thinking_ch9.pdf; 18 pages] / library) by Colin Ware. Yes, we’re reading the last chapter first. You might want to skim through the book leading up to it (I basically read quickly) it in one sitting. Reading the ending might motivate you to read the whole thing (which we will later). The perspective here is how the perceptual science might suggest why vis is interesting. Remember that you can access this book online if you don’t have it.
- Chapter 2 “Visual Statistical Thinking” from Tufte’s Visual Explanations (pages 26-53; 27 pages) . The perspective here is historical – what can happen when Visualizations work or fail. A scan of the chapter is here. (3-VE-2-Visual-Statistical-Thinking.pdf; note this was a link to the wrong chapter originally)
- The first 17 pages of the Introduction to “Information Visualization: Using Visualization to Think” by Card, Mackinlay, and Schneiderman (01-InfoVis-CardMackinlaySchneid-Chap1.pdf). This is a 1999 book that consists of this intro, and a bunch of seminal papers. The examples are old, but the main points are timeless. It is the best thing I know of that gets at Vis from the cognitive science perspective. The rest of the chapter (past page 17) is good too, but more redundant with other things we’ll read – so it’s optional.
There’s a 4th reading – it’s more part of the next week (but there will be too much reading already next week), and I want to use it in class on Wednesday Feb 1. I want people to learn to critique things. Usually, we just critique – but one of my goals in this class is to teach people to do it more effectively. This chapter (which is part of a whole book on how to critique productively) will hopefully give you some things to think about, although ultimately, I think it just takes practice.
- “Understanding Critique,” Chapter 1 of Discussing Design by Adam Conor and Aaron Irizarry, O’Reilly Books, 2015. Chapter available online as a sampler from the publisher. (pp. 7-25, 18 pages)