04/01/14
Syllabus overview: we don't necessarily stop to develop a critical theory of our relationship with information and visualization. Making visualizations in fairly standard ways. Some people in this class will want to develop practical skills, some historical, others want something else, something experimental, pushing boundaries.
Theoretical: How do we understand social relations, notions of centrality, betweenness?
Examine historical archive's infinity of solutions to visualize information, informed by all sorts of belief systems.
Seminar, discussion, workshop
Community of shared knowledge
Critique spatial mapping
Display of qualitative and quantitative phenomenon
Rhetoric of information visualization-->the argument within the visual environment. How does the graphical means construct the information?
Classic texts; the field is exploding right now. Doesn't have a long critical literature. Why is this the case?
Each week we'll turn in with the image a statement summarizing for yourself what you got from the exercise in the last class.
Final project will be fun. Set of data-->work out the "best" way to visualize it; pragmatic
MT: I could do the IS faculty mapping
Can also do critical, creative, historical
Example: epidemics: what are you showing? ways visualizations historically very interesting
Critical project-->graphical principles of scale and metrics; what are the rhetoric, politics, ethics of a scale?
Creative: affective character of different places at different times of day; pull in aspects of experience that aren't usually manifest in the representations
Short projects will demonstrate ability to visualize; connection to readings, images, principles in class
Paper: 1. Research 2. Argument clarity 3. Writing (proofed & finished) 4. Quality of thought
June 3rd: presentation; turn in corrections by June 6
May work together on final projects
Send Johanna useful links with annotation
Visual Function Book
Schmidt: Statistical Graphs
Tufte is pretty, but Johanna is systematically opposed to all of his stuff.
"Aesthetics are rhetoric"
The graphs aren't beautiful in Schmidt. Tufte is beautiful and transformed the field of infographics but doesn't tell you how to do it.
Card, McKinley, Schneiderman: Info Viz-->digital tech
Nathan Yao: how to DO info viz
