Visualization

Overview

The goal of this unit is to teach students to:

Understand the goals of visualization.
Know what the issues involved in visualization are.
Be able to recognize and reason about the different types of visualization.
Be introduced to a sampling of the tools used to visualize data.

Background Reading for Teachers and TAs

web tool for non-programmers for making mashups
chapter 1 of book on power of geo mashups
Wikipedia page on Information Visualization
Wikipedia page on Visualization
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte
"The Elements of Graphing Data" by William Cleveland

Reading Assignments for Students

Needs to be created I think Agreed.

Reference Material

Lecture Notes

Introduction
- At this point students have already created/worked with a couple models and created basic graphs to visualize them. Talk about how even with just the simple models created so far, understanding the data is hard without having a visual representation of it.
- Visualization is a graphical representation of data for the purpose of allowing humans to understand aspects of the data.
  - Couple of illustrative but basic graphs as examples.
- Tufte's aspects of visualization, just a run through (From "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"):
  - Show the data.
  - Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about the methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else.
  - Avoid distorting what the data have to say.
  - Present many numbers in a small space.
  - Make large data sets coherent.
  - Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data.
  - Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from broad overview to the fine structure.
  - Serve a reasonable clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration.
  - Be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set.
- Show some more complex examples like the Napoleon one, an interesting mashup.
Issues of visualization
- Objective. There is always a goal or objective when visualizing by which one can judge effectiveness. In this class I don't think things like marketing should be mentioned but certainly the difference between using visualization to explore data and to explain data to others.
- Data Selection. When given a set of data, often one wants to single in on a subset of that data to look at.
- Psychology. Visualization is fundamentally about how humans perceive visual information so you have to think about the ways in which you want to take advantage of human psychology.
- Systemization. While elaborate visualizations like the Napoleon one are very compelling, in Computer Science we are often more interested in visualizations that can be systematically generated.
Go through a couple of examples of creating visualizations referring back to Tufte's list and the issues.
Types of Visualizations (A sampling)
- Tables
- Graphs
- Charts
- Sparklines
- Time Series
- Data maps and mashups

Seems a bit short. Acquiring data, conditioning data, tools to use for those and visualization.

Consider showing really good graphics (Napoleon, earthquake video, etc.) and really bad ones (Tufte's examples) as part of the lecture. Much easier to show good and bad then explain it.

Lab

Use online tools to generate tabular data from the U.S. Census and then use Spreadsheet software and Google mashups to explore visualization.

Process

Part 1
- Open up Spreadsheet with a small set of provided data. Do you have the 'provided data' already?
- Generate a sequence of 3 or 4 graphs and charts based on the data.
  - For each graph identify pros and cons of that type of graph for this data.
  - Identify best graph type for data. Will some of this have been covered already? How will they know what they're looking for in pros/cons?
Part 2
- Open a browser to the | IPUMS website Break down the site navigation: Where do they need to go? How do they register? etc
  - Select a specific (provided) set of criteria What is the criteria?
  - Generate the data based on the criteria ???
  - Download data in text form
  - Import data into Spreadsheet This too will need a step-by-step breakdown
- Given your experience from Part 1, what type of visualization do you think is most appropriate and why.
- Generate a given type of graph.
  - What, if anything, interesting can you see from the graph?
- Use tool to generate google mashup. This is very vague. What is "tool"? Specify what the tools are, where we find them and how we use them
  - What differences in terms of visual information are there between the graph and the mashup?
Part 3
- Go back to the IPUMS site and generate data based on your own set of criteria.
- Create a graph and mashup as in Part 2. Use general visualization guidelines to maximize the effectiveness of your visualizations. What do you mean by 'general visualization guidelines'? Or is this something that will have been covered at this point? This section will be a lot more lucid with something for someone to sit down and try. Evaluation of their visualizations aside, we need to know: what are the provided data for part 1? How do we navigate the IPUMS site? What are these "criteria" for choosing the data? How do we get the data into a spreadsheet? What is "Tool"? (is it kind of like "Book"?) Where do we find Tool? How do we use Tool to make a mashup?

Write-up

Notes from lab including results from Part 3 You might want to be a little more specific because people are lazy. Or they might go, uh, I didn't take any notes... These notes might be their answers to the questions like "identify pros and cons" or "what's interesting about this graph"?
What types of visualizations seem most appropriate for visualizing this type of census data and why?
What could you determine from the visualizations you created in Part 3?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of mashups vs traditional graphs?
When creating the visualizations for Part 3, what guidelines did you follow to make the visualization more effective and how did you follow them?
In what way could your visualizations be improved given more time or more advanced tools?

This section is very good! Ditto

Software

Spreadsheet software.
Web browser.
Access to IPUMS.

Bill of Materials

None assuming we don't go and buy spreadsheet software and/or web browser.

Evaluation

CRS Questions

Whats the best type of visualization for X set of data?
XXX
XXX

Quiz Questions

XXX A question.

Visualization - Metadata

XXX This section contains information about the goals of the unit and the approaches taken to meet them.

Scheduling

Should come before anything too complicated, but after basic modeling concepts.

Concepts, Techniques and Tools

XXX This is a placeholder for a list of items from the context page.

General Education Alignment

Analytical Reasoning Requirement

Abstract Reasoning

From the [Catalog Description] Courses qualifying for credit in Abstract Reasoning typically share these characteristics:

They focus substantially on properties of classes of abstract models and operations that apply to them.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
They provide experience in generalizing from specific instances to appropriate classes of abstract models.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
They provide experience in solving concrete problems by a process of abstraction and manipulation at the abstract level. Typically this experience is provided by word problems which require students to formalize real-world problems in abstract terms, to solve them with techniques that apply at that abstract level, and to convert the solutions back into concrete results.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.

Quantitative Reasoning

From the [Catalog Description] General Education courses in Quantitative Reasoning foster students' abilities to generate, interpret and evaluate quantitative information. In particular, Quantitative Reasoning courses help students develop abilities in such areas as:

Using and interpreting formulas, graphs and tables.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Representing mathematical ideas symbolically, graphically, numerically and verbally.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Using mathematical and statistical ideas to solve problems in a variety of contexts.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Using simple models such as linear dependence, exponential growth or decay, or normal distribution.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Understanding basic statistical ideas such as averages, variability and probability.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Making estimates and checking the reasonableness of answers.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Recognizing the limitations of mathematical and statistical methods.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.

Scientific Inquiry Requirement

From the [Catalog Description] Scientific inquiry:

Develops students' understanding of the natural world.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Strengthens students' knowledge of the scientific way of knowing — the use of systematic observation and experimentation to develop theories and test hypotheses.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.
Emphasizes and provides first-hand experience with both theoretical analysis and the collection of empirical data.
- Analysis of this unit's support or not for this item.

Scaffolded Learning

This unit asks students to take the types of considerations they used to build graphs not only in the previous couple units but during their entire academic history and extend them into a more general framework of visualization.

Inquiry Based Learning

XXX Some prose.

Visualization Mechanics

To Do

Consider doing something based on IBM's Many Eyes tool.

Comments

Fixed both. With a tool as sporty as Google Earth available to do geographic visualizations wouldn't it be nice to use that too in conjunction with the Census data?

Include a visualization with KML and Google Earth

Seriously consider OpenOffice

Authorship

Matthew Edlefsen

CS382:Unit-mashup

Contents