SIMS 247: Information Visualization and Presentation Tentative List of Readings and Software

Overview Syllabus Assignments Lectures Administrivia Books & Software Related Courses Online InfoViz Resources

Readings There will be a course reader along with the required books. Full list of references in the reader. All of these books can be ordered from amazon.com. The Tufte books are available at a discount there. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte, Graphics Press, 1983. Dynamics in Document Design, Karen A. Schriver, John Wiley & Sons, 1997. Choose one of the following two books. They both address the creation and use of (primarily 2D) plots of data. The first (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 distinguished cognitive psychologist with considerable experience in the field. It has the added bonus of giving a little bit of psychological background, and it is a very fast read. Elements of Graph Design, Stephen Kosslyn, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1993. The second (Cleveland) is a classic reference; it is also more advanced, scientific, expensive, and longer (and takes longer to arrive from Amazon). Elements of Graphing Data, William S. Cleveland, Hobart Press, 1994. The following are recommended but not required (we will have excerpts in the reader): Designing Visual Interfaces, Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano, Prentice-Hall, 1995. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (3rd Edition), Ben Shneiderman, Addison-Wesley, 1997. (I recommend you buy this book if you are planning on taking the user interfaces course next year.) Proceedings of 1997 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization ( Information about the conference.) Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte, Graphics Press, 1990. Software Pad++ Visible Decisions Inc SeeIt/In3D IVEE Spotfire InXight's tools, in particular, the TableLens Lucent's SeeSoft and related tools. ATT's XGobi ATT's Graphviz tools vtk IBM Visualization Data Explorer (DX)