Course Information

Resources

Relevant Books

None of the books listed below are appropriate as a textbook for the course, but I've listed them here in case you want to know more. I have copies of most of these; feel free to borrow them from me.

Infoviz Overviews

Perceptual and Psychological Principles

I recommend Ware if you are interested in perceptual principles:
  • Colin Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Morgan Kaufmann 2000.
  • Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology , MIT Press, 1999.
  • Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and Mind , Harvard University Press, 1986.

Graphic Design in Infoviz

  • Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, 1983.
  • Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, Graphics Press, 1990.

    Kosslyn is more like a cookbook or how-to guide and should be useful for people not very experienced with making graphs (although I think it is useful even if you are experienced; it puts a lot of your implicit knowledge explicitly in one place). Although it is light on the scientific justifications, it is written by a cognitive psychologist with considerable experience in the field.

  • Stephen Kosslyn, Elements of Graph Design, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1993.
  • Howard Wainer, How to Display Data Badly (Video) http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/ChanceLecture/AudioVideo.html

Information Visualization Research

Classics

Both of these are classics:

Infoviz Collections

  • Infovis.net include a magazine called Inf@Vis
  • Atlas of Cyberspaces
    A really big collection of interesting visualization links, especially maps, graphs, and landscapes.
  • Gallery of Data Visualization; The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics
  • UMD On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments
  • Information Visualization Resources on the Web by Tamara Munzner

    Interesting Visualizations

    (People who pointed these out to me appear in parentheses.)
  • NationMaster
  • The John Edwards Policy Speech Map (Ryan Shaw)
  • Secret Lives of Numbers by Golan Levin (Egon Pasztor)
  • Visual Illusions and Movement (Shahar Maoz)
  • Interactive depiction of distribution of democrat delegates (Maria Lawrence)
  • TreeMaps applied to Online News (Mary Hodder)

    Other Recent Infoviz Courses

  • Munzner's class at UBC, 2004
  • Stasko's class at Georgia Tech, 2003
  • North's class at Virginia Tech, 2003
  • Borner's class at IU, 2002
  • Spoerri's class at Rutgers 2003
  • Brookes' class at UW, 2001
  • Storey's class at MIT, 2002
  • Kobsa's class at UCI, 2002

    Software

  • The ILOG Discovery Preview can be downloaded freely with its complete documentation.
  • A set of 2D and 3D tools, several of which can be downloaded, put together by Ben Houston.
  • The Rivet Toolkit and the Polaris Project from Pat Hanrahan's group at Stanford.

    Other Readings

    Research papers by Michael Bernard on psychological factors in Web design

    From Kari Holmquist:
    Moving train is quicker than the eye: Misperception can lead a motorist into fatal move SFChron, Dec 4, 2003.

    Video Skimming papers:

    SmartSkip: consumer level browsing and skipping of digital video content Steven M. Drucker, Asta Glatzer, Steven De Mar, Curtis Wong April 2002 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves

    Rapid serial visual presentation techniques for consumer digital video devices Kent Wittenburg, Clifton Forlines, Tom Lanning, Alan Esenther, Shigeo Harada, Taizo Miyachi November 2003 Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

    The Great Powerpoint Controversy:

    Interesting uses of Flash:
    •