General description

Information visualization is the science of turning data into useful information. It is accomplished by utilizing the capabilities of human perceptual system and cognitive processing power. This course will focus on the history, design, and creation of visual imagery, both static and interactive. Through hands-on exercises students will have a chance to investigate the techniques and tools to unveil the underlying patterns of data, and how to support human cognition in insight-generation. The main objectives of the course are to learn the most important principles of information visualization, and a number of computer-based tools to create them. This course is multi-disciplinary by nature, and has been successfully taken, e.g., by students of economics, psychology, philosophy, statistics, engineering, and computer science.

Learning outcomes

Upon completion of the course the student should
? be acquainted with the most important landmarks in the history of information visualization
? understand the information visualization approach and its place in the general context of human-computer interaction
? be familiar with the most common information visualization techniques, systems and challenges
? be able to critically reflect upon standard approaches and new designs
? have an adequate background to design new visualizations
? be able to review and empirically evaluate a visualization design
? have experience in writing and reviewing academic lecture diaries
? be familiar with the guidelines of responsible conduct of research

Contents

The course includes the following topics, but is not limited to them
? history of information visualization
? basics of visual perception
? visual encoding of data
? the most common visualization and interaction techniques for numerical, text, network, and time series data
? design and creation of InfoGraphics
? the most common tools of the trade

Teaching methods

Teaching method	Contact	Online
Lectures	14 h	0 h

The theoretical student workload for a 5 credit course is 135 hours (5 x 27). In addition to lectures, the rest of the workload on this course involves writing and reviewing of lecture diaries, reading articles, and doing weekly design exercises. The actual distribution of the hours depends on the student.
The course is not lectured every year.

Teaching language

English

Evaluation

Numeric 1-5.

Study materials

1. Selection of research articles
2. Spence, R.,Information Visualization: An Introduction, 3rd edition. Springer 2014
3. Munzner, T., Visualization Analysis & Design. CRC Press 2015
4. Ware, C., Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Morgan Kaufmann 2004.

Belongs to following study modules