Course Description


The data deluge is here, and will only grow

  • The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years
  • Much of this information is on the web: annual internet traffic will reach one zettabyte (1G TBs) by 2015
  • With 5 billion mobile phones worldwide, that information can reach us at any time

Succeeding in this data-rich future requires fluency in the visual language of the web, including

  • Basic visual principles drawn from perception and design
  • Decades of visualization technique
  • Good vs. bad visualization
  • The ability to create effective visualizations
  • Web visualization tools, including html5

This course is designed to give you those skills
Instructor:
Ben Watson, Associate Professor, Computer Science 
Content:
An intensive introduction to the design and development of web visualizations. By the course's end, student teams will implement a working, interactive visualization website, using html5 or a similar API. Students will learn process, starting with finding and cleaning data, designing and prototyping a visualization, implementing that visualization, and ending with evaluation; principles from both perception and Gestalt psychology; technique, for spatial, geospatial, high dimensional, graph and textual data; interaction, including selection and querying, exploring and walking, zooming and details on demand, as well as linking and brushing; evaluation with both formal and informal experimental designs; tools including html5, ManyEyes, prefuse and Flare, d3, Processing and Google Charts; and research frontiers, including visualization effectiveness, casual visualization, and mobile visualization. RTP experts from companies such as SAS, IBM and Allscripts will visit to provide real world context. 
591 vs. 761:
Students taking the 761 version of this course will receive less weight in grading for the project portion of their work, and demonstrate deeper knowledge of the course topic by producing a full research paper describing their projects. 
Prerequisites:
None, though good programming skills are necessary

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