L697(6962/6963): Information Visualization (Spring 2002)

Course Description | Grade | Policies | Course Outline | Resources
 

Tell me, I forget, show me, I remember, involve me, I understand.
-- Benjamin Franklin
This course was taught in Spring 2001 for the very first time.
Students' final projects resulted in four Workshop/Conference papers.

Instructor: Katy Börner | Email: katy@indiana.edu | Office: Main Library 019 | Phone: 855-3256
Assistant Instructor: Jason Baumgartner | Email: jlbaumga@indiana.edu

Lecture: Wed 4:00p-5:15p LI001 Lab: Wed 6:00p-7:15p, LI503
Office hours: Tue 4:00p-5:00p, Main Library 019 (Katy) | Fri 1:00p-3:00p, Franklin Hall 306 (Jason)

Prerequisites: Java programming skills comparable with L578 (Mostafa) or C212 or H212 in CS

Majordomo List: katy_l697@indiana.edu
Class Webpage: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/L697
Project Handin Webpage:http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/classes/handin/L697-S02/

Lecture and lab notes are accessible in my ella directory '~katy/www/L697/*.ppt'
Software packages are linked from http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/L697/code/

Supplemental Readings (on reserve in the SLIS library):

Course Description
The visual representation of information requires a deep understanfing of human perceptual and cognitive capabilities, computer graphics, interface and interaction design, as well as creativity.
Information - such as log files reporting access of webpages or citation data - is typically non-spatial or abstract and needs to be mapped into a physical space that will represent relationships contained in the information faithfully and efficiently. If done successfully, visualizations can provide a very intuitive and efficient "interface between two powerful information processing systems - the human mind and the modern computer" [Gershom et al., 1998].
This course provides an overview about the state of the art in the emerging field of information visualization. It will highlight the process of producing effective visualizations that take the needs of users into account and illustrate practical visualization procedures. It will cover the The course objective is to give you a working knowledge of how to effectively visualize abstract information and hands-on experience in the application of this knowledge to specific domains, different tasks such as browsing or organizing information for diverse and possibly non-technical users.

The course utilizes a combination of lectures, presentations and discussions, and projects. It also comprises six Overview & Discussion sessions that present state of the art tools for the visualization of Web Topology & Web Traffic, Web & File directories, Software & Workspaces, Web & Digital Library Content & Online Comunities. There will be in class presentations of public-domain software and you will work with software packages that have been developed for this course. You will be expected to do weekly Readings, to provide a Presentation of specific readings, to participate in class, and to work in teams for projects 2 through 4 improving your social competence.

Grade
Individual and group work will be evaluated according to how well the course material is understood and implemented into projects, quality of written and oral presentations. You are expected to spend about 8 hours per week outside of class for readings, presentation, and projects.
The final grade will be based on class participation (10%), presentation of selected readings (10%), projects (55%) and a written final test (25%). Grades are assigned according to the grading standards of SLIS.

Class participation:
The quantity and quality of contributions made to class (especially during paper discussions) and electronic discussions counts for 10% of the grade.
All students will be expected to study the assigned readings before each class and to participate in class by asking and answering questions. Readings are assigned for study in preparation for class discussion. Thus, class 2 readings should be completed before attending the second week's class.

Presentation of selected readings:
The 20 minute presentation will address a specific topic/question and will be based on readings from the literature or Internet. Sources will be provided. If you can find more that's great. See Preparation of Presentations for more details.
You are expected to consult the instructor during office hours the week in which you will give the presentation. Prepare your presentation as well as any specific questions you may have in advance.

Projects:
There will be four projects. Except for the first project, you will work on them in teams. Submit links to resulting webpages via mail to katy@indiana.edu.
Projects will be graded according to

Final test:
The final test primarily tests your knowledge of the material presented in class and the assigned readings.
In class 13 will have the opportunity to write six test questions and exemplary answers that test main course topics. This will give you the opportunity to evaluate course topics, reflect on what you understood, and what are good test items for the upcoming final exam. The resulting set of questions as well as missing material will be discussed in class 14 as preparation for the final exam.

Credits: 3 for L697

Policies
  1. Class attendance: Please let me know if you can't make it to a class.
  2. Plagiarism: Clearly indicate if you use materials from other sources. Academic and personal misconduct by students in this class are dealt with according to the Student Disciplinary Procedures.
  3. Late Handin Policy: Late assignments or incompletes are allowed only because of an unforeseen emergency that is preceded by diligent work, not for a pattern of weak performance. No individual student will be allowed to do extra work to raise the final grade or to make up missing work. All grades become final one week after the material is returned to you. If there is a medical or personal reason requiring you to miss an exam, you must present your excuse in writing, and we require some physical proof. Course work handed in
    1.      within the first 10 min past 8 pm will receive at most 90% of the possible points.
    2.      between 8.10 pm  to 9 pm receive at most 50% of the possible points.
    3.      past 9 pm receive F.
    Make sure you submit projects in time and your program/webpage works ok!
Course Outline
The class schedule may change as the course progresses; changes will be posted on the course website and the majordomo-list.

Introduction

Class 1 (01-09-2002)
Course description & outline, class format, grades, resources.
Information Visualization - Overview, history, relation to scientific visualization.
Overview & Discussion: Web Topology and Web Traffic Visualization.

Project 1: Personal Webpage - Design a personal webpage that tells about you and your expectations of the course and that contains the favorite Java applet you wrote - provide the source code so that I get to know your programming style.
Handin: Day before class 2

Class 2  (01-16-2002)
Setting the context (Foundations for a science of data visualization [Ware, 1999] chapter 1). User & task analysis.
Readings: Nahum Gershon, Stephen G. Eick and Stuart Card (1998) Information visualization, Interactions March & April, pp 9-15. I. Herman, M. S. Marshall, and G. Melançon (2000) Graph Visualisation and Navigation in Information Visualisation: A Survey, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 6, pp. 24-43.
Katy Börner & Yuezheng Zhou (2001) A Software Repository for Education and Research in Information Visualization. Information Visualisation Conference, London, England, July 25-27, pp. 257-262.
Lab: Introduction of Hyperbolic Trees, Treemaps, and the Information Visualization XML Toolkit by Jason Baumgartner. Hints how to use the XML Toolkit on MACs.

Project 2: User-centered design and discussion of hierarchical information visualizations- Conduct a simple task and user analysis & design two different hierarchical information visualizations (hyperbolic tree and space filling/tree map algorithm) of a data set of your choice and discuss the resulting visualizations. Use the new Information Visualization XML Toolkit to design the visualizations.
Handin: Day before class 5
Snapshots of Visualizations

Perception for Design

Class 3  (01-23-2002)
General overview (Environment, optics, resolution and display [Ware, 1999] chapter 2; Lightness, brightness, contrast and constancy [Ware, 1999] chapter 3; Color [Ware, 1999] chapter 4).
Lab: XML Basics. Running JBuilder 6 in your account. [MatLab jumpstart. - later]

Class 4:  (01-30-2002)
Making information visible (Visual attention and information that pops out [Ware, 1999] chapter 5; Static and moving patterns [Ware, 1999] chapter 6; Visual objects and data objects [Ware, 1999] chapter 7). Preattentive Processing by Christopher G. Healey.
Readings: Chi, E.H., Riedel, J., Barry, Ph., & Konstan, J.(1998) Principles for Information Visualization Spreadsheets. In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (Special Issue on Visualization), IEEE CS Press. p. 30--38.
Lab: Utilization of the Information Visualization XML Toolkit by Jason Baumgartner. Discussion of project 2.

Class 5:  (02-06-2002)
Perception and interaction. Optical illusions. (Space perception and the display of data in space [Ware, 1999] chapter 8; Images and words [Ware, 1999] chapter 9), Spotfire demo by Mark Notess.
Overview & Discussion: Visualization of Web and File directories
Presentation:

Data Analysis

Class 6:  (02-13-2002)
Data analysis overview. SVD & LSA.
Readings: Susan Dumais, John Platt, David Heckerman and Mehran Sahami (1998) Inductive learning algorithms and representations for text categorization. Proceedings of the ACM 7th international conference on Information and knowledge management, Washington, pp 148 - 155.
Lab: Introduction of Latent Semantic Analysis and Spring Embedding algorithm by Jason Baumgartner
Presentation:

Project 3: Use LSA to extract the document-by-document similarity matrix for a data set. Visualize the result using force directed placement.
Handin: Day before class 9
Snapshots of Visualizations

Class 7:  (02-20-2002)
Salton - Vector space analysis, Clustering & Multidimensional Scaling
Readings: How Text Clustering Works &  Douglass Cutting, David Karger, Jan Pedersen, and John W. Tukey. Scatter/Gather: A Cluster-based Approach to Browsing Large Document Collections, Proceedings of the 15th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference, Copenhagen, 1992.

Presentation:

Lab: Discussion of project 3 sketches. Overview & Discussion: Visualizing Documents

Information Visualization

Class 8:  (02-27-2002)
Display techniques: tabular displays, node and link diagrams, hierarchical structures, data landscapes, etc.
Readings: Keim, D. Visual Exploration of Large Data Sets. Communications of the ACM, Vol 44, No 8, August 2001.
Presentation:

Lab: Pathfinder Network Scaling & MDS.

Class 9: (03-06-2002)
Overview & Discussion: Visualization of software & workspaces.
Readings:  Holmquist, L.E., Fagrell, H. and Busso, R. Navigating Cyberspace with CyberGeo Maps. In Proceedings of IRIS 21, Sæby, Denmark, 1998. http://www.viktoria.informatik.gu.se/publications/98/VRR-98-10.pdf

Presentations:

Project 4: Write an interactive interface to a data set. You will collaborate with faculty.
Handin: Day before class 15

Class 10: (03-13-2002) Have a nice Spring Break!

Class 11: (03-20-2002)
Spatial Layout Algorithms: Force directed methods, tree maps, Kohonen maps, and more.
Readings:  See WEBSOM - Self-Organizing Maps for Internet Exploration.
Explore www.smarmoney.com/marketmap and www.smartdatavision.com. Read Ben Shneiderman (1992) Tree visualization with tree-maps: 2-d space-filling approach. ACM Transactions on Graphics 11, 1, pp 92 - 99.
Presentation:

Class 12: (03-27-2002)
Spatial Layout Algorithms: Radial drawing. Visualization of search results.
Readings: Tamara Munzner and Paul Burchard (1995) Visualizing the Structure of the World Wide Web in 3D Hyperbolic Space. Proceedings of VRML '95, San Diego, California, Special issue of Computer Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH, New York, 1995, pp. 33-38. See also LexisNexis applet.
Lab: Present your final project sketch

Class 13: (04-03-2002)
Interaction techniques. See also interacting with visualizations [Ware, 1999] chapter 10.
Presentation:

Class 14: (04-10-2002)
Distortion techniques. Scaling and complexity issues.
Readings: Christopher Ahlberg, Christopher Williamson and Ben Shneiderman (1992) Dynamic queries for information exploration: An implementation and evaluation. Conference Proceedings on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 619 - 626.

Student generated test questions
Write six test questions and exemplary answers that test main course topics. This will give you the opportunity to evaluate course topics, reflect on what you understood, and what are good test items for the upcoming final exam. Submit result via email to katy@indiana.edu by Sunday 4-14-02.

Class 15:  (04-17-2002)
Overview & Discussion:Online community visualization.
Current trends in information visualization & remaining fundamental problems in the field.
Discussion of test questions as preparation for final exam.
Presentations:

FINAL PROJECT & Exam

Class 16: (04-24-2002)
Final Project Demo

Final Exam on Friday, May 3 at 2:45 p.m. Room LI001.
It will be open book - you can use all your notes etc. You will not be able to use a computer.

Resources
This section of the course webpage will frequently be updated. Please suggest links to include. Related Classes

HomeFacultyKaty BörnerL697

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/L697
Last modified: 09/05/2002