CSC 544 - Advanced Data Visualization

Spring 2025

Meets: Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45pm, Gould-Simpson, Rm 701
Instructor: Joshua A. Levine
Office: GS 754
Office Hours: By appointment, Schedule via Calendly
Course Syllabus
D2L
Piazza

Course Calendar

(tentative, subject to change)

Week	Date	Tuesday	Date	Thursday

1	Jan 14	-- No Class --	Jan 16	Introduction
2	Jan 21	HTML/Javascript Basics	Jan 23	d3 Intro
3	Jan 28	d3 Joins and Scales	Jan 30	Design Principles
4	Feb 04	Perception	Feb 06	Data Abstraction
5	Feb 11	Visual Encoding	Feb 13	Color
6	Feb 18	Tasks and Interaction	Feb 20	Views, Focus+Context
7	Feb 25	Tabular Arrangements	Feb 27	Hierarchies/Trees
8	Mar 04	Graphs	Mar 06	Cartography
9	Mar 11	-- Spring Break --	Mar 13	-- Spring Break --
10	Mar 18	Interpolation	Mar 20	Isosurfaces
11	Mar 25	Volumetric Data	Mar 27	Volume Rendering
12	Apr 01	Transfer Function Design	Apr 03	Topology
13	Apr 08	Flow Data	Apr 10	Flow Visualization
14	Apr 15	FlowVis: Features, Time	Apr 17	Uncertainty
15	Apr 22	Text and Sets	Apr 24	Retrospective
16	Apr 29	Project Presentations	May 01	Project Presentations
17	May 06	Project Presentations	May 08	-- Reading Day --

Highlighted dates have an assignment due by the start of class.

Highlighted dates have a project milestone due by the start of class.

Boxed dates correspond to the nearest class day to the deadlines for dropping without a W (Feb. 11, 2025) and withdrawing (Apr. 01, 2025) for this semester. See Spring 2025 Graduate Dates and Deadlines for complete details.

Link to Google drive folder with all lecture slides

Lecture 01 - Introduction (slides)

Date: January 16, 2025

Required Reading:

Course Syllabus
Netiquette Rules
A Tour of Visualizations, Good, Bad, and Ugly Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).

Optional Reading:

Hans Rosling, TED 2006
A Tour through the Visualization Zoo., Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, Vadim Ogievetsky. Communications of the ACM, 53(6) pp. 59-67, Jun 2010.
How to Read a Visualization Research Paper: Extracting the Essentials. Robert S. Laramee. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (IEEE CG&A), Vol. 31, No. 3, May/June 2011, pages 78-82.
The Value of Visualization. Jarke van Wijk. Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization Conference, pp. 79-86, 2005.

Lecture 02 - HTML/Javascript Basics (draft slides)

Date: January 21, 2025

Required Reading:

The Basics of the Web Stack - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).
Javascript - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).
Murray, Chapter 3 (all pages except for the section on Javasript) (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)

Optional Reading:

Speaking JavaScript: An In-Depth Guide for Programmers - Chapter 1. Basic JavaScript (note, most chapters of this book cover Javascript in great detail, but the focus of the book is ES5)
Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd Edition: A Modern Introduction to Programming (note, this is included as a reference. The book is a great way to learn ES6, but you need not read it all at once)
Advice on Learning Javascript - Michael Gleicher (Wisconsin). Other than the textbook links, check out the video lectures at the bottom of this page for more repetition on the basics of the language, closures, and more
Lecture 3 Activities - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).

Lecture 03 - d3 Intro (draft slides)

Date: January 23, 2025

Required Reading:

Murray, Chapter 5,6 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
DOM Manipulation - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).
Welcome to d3 - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).

Optional Reading:

Lecture 04 - d3 Joins and Scales

Date: January 28, 2025

Required Reading:

Murray, Chapter 7 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
d3 Scales - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).

Optional Reading:

d3 Drills - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).

Lecture 05 - Design Principles

Date: January 30, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 1, 6.10 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)

Optional Reading:

The good, the bad, and the biased: five ways visualizations can mislead (and how to fix them). Danielle Albers Szafir. Interactions. 2018.
Design Principles for Visual Communication. Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot Li, Floraine Berthouzoz. Communications of the ACM, 54(4), pp. 60-69, Apr 2011.
99% Details. Podcast from 99% Invisible, Sep 2010.
Negative Space. Bang Wong. Nature Methods 8:1, Dec. 2010.
Design of data figures. Bang Wong. Nature Methods 7:665, Sept 2010.
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001.

Lecture 06 - Perception

Date: February 04, 2025

Required Reading:

Ware, Information Visualization, Chapter 3. Note that this book is free to access on campus (the above link will not work off campus).
Attention and Visual Memory in Visualization and Computer Graphics. Christopher G. Healey, James T. Enns. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 18(7): 1170-1188 (2012)

Optional Reading:

Gestalt principles (Part 1) Bang Wong. Nature Methods 7, pp. 863, Nov 2010.
Gestalt principles (Part 2) Bang Wong. Nature Methods 7, pp. 941, Dec 2010.
Jurassic Mark: Inattentional Blindness for a Datasaurus Reveals that Visualizations are Explored, not Seen. Tal Boger, Steven B. Most, Steven L. Franconeri. IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 71-75, 2021.

Lecture 07 - Data Abstraction

Date: February 06, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 2 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
On the Theory of Scales of Measurement. S. S. Stevens. Science, 103(2684), pp. 677-680, June 1946.

Optional Reading:

Polaris: a system for query, analysis, and visualization of multidimensional databases. Chris Stolte, Diane Tang, Pat Hanrahan. Commun. ACM 51(11): 75-84 (2008).
Guidelines for Pursuing and Revealing Data Abstractions. Alex Bigelow, Katy Williams, Katherine E. Isaacs, in IEEE TVCG 27(2), 1503-1513, 2021.

Lecture 08 - Visual Encoding

Date: February 11, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 5, 6.3-6.6 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
Automating the Design of Graphical Presentations of Relational Information. Jock Mackinlay. ACM TOG 5(2), 1986.

Optional Reading:

Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. William S. Cleveland and Robert McGill, Journal of the American statistical association 79, no. 387 (1984): 531-554.
Animation: Can It Facilitate? Barbara Tversky, Julie Morrison, Mireille Betrancourt. International Journal of Human Computer Studies 57:4, pp 247-262, 2002.

Lecture 09 - Color

Date: February 13, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 10.1-10.3, 6.9 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
Which color scale to use when visualizing data. Lisa Charlotte Muth, 2021 (All 4 parts).
See also: How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations.

Optional Reading:

Color Vision - Carlos Scheidegger (CSC 444 Fall 2019).
Rainbows Revisited: Modeling Effective Colormap Design for Graphical Inference. Khairi Reda and Danielle Albers Szafir. IEEE TVCG 2021.
Ware, Information Visualization, Chapter 4. Note that this book is free to access on campus (the above link will not work off campus).
Color Use Guidelines for Data Representation. Cynthia A. Brewer. Proceedings of the Section on Statistical Graphics, American Statistical Association, Alexandria VA. pp. 55-60. 1999.
See also: Colorbrewer: Color Advice for Maps
Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful. D. Borland and R. Taylor. Computer Graphics and Applications, 27(2), pp. 14-17, 2007.
Color (listen) - Radiolab
http://www.brucelindbloom.com Bruce Lindbloom. Useful color information, studies, and Files.
Is Your Red The Same as My Red? (watch) - Vsauce.

Lecture 10 - Tasks and Interaction

Date: February 18, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 3, 6.8, 11 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)

Optional Reading:

Smooth and Efficient Zooming and Panning. Jack J. van Wijk and Wim A.A. Nuij, Proc. InfoVis 2003, p. 15-22
Animated Transitions in Statistical Data Graphics. Jeffrey Heer and George G. Robertson. IEEE TVCG (Proc. InfoVis 2007) 13(6): 1240-1247, 2007.
Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis Jeffrey Heer and Ben Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM, 55(4), pp. 45-54, 2012.
A Design Space of Visualization Tasks. Hans-Jorg Schulz, Thomas Nocke, Magnus Heitzler, and Heidrun Schumann. IEEE TVCG, 19(12): 2376-2385, 2013.

Lecture 11 - Views, Focus+Context

Date: February 20, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 12, 6.7, 14 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
A review of overview+detail, zooming, and focus+context interfaces. Andy Cockburn, Amy Karlson, and Benjamin B. Bederson. ACM Computing Surveys 41(1), 2008.

Optional Reading:

The visual design and control of the trellis display. R. Becker, W. Cleveland, M. Shyu. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 5(2), 1996.
Toolglass and magic lenses: the see-through interface. Eric A. Bier, Maureen C. Stone, Ken Pier, William Buxton, and Tony D. DeRose, Proc. SIGGRAPH, pp. 73-76, 1993.
Interactive Coordinated Multiple-View Visualization of Biomechanical Motion Data. Daniel F. Keefe, Marcus Ewert, William Ribarsky, Remco Chang. IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. Vis 2009), 15(6):1383-1390, 2009.

Lecture 12 - Tabular Arrangements

Date: February 25, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 7, 15.3-15.5 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
Hierarchical Parallel Coordinates for Exploration of Large Datasets. Ying-Huey Fua, Matthew O. Ward, and Elke A. Rundensteiner. IEEE Visualization 1999.

Optional Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 13 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
Multi-Scale Banking to 45 Degrees. Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala. Proc. InfoVis 2006, published as IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 12(5): 701-708, Sep/Oct 2006.
Stacked Graphs - Geometry & Aesthetics. Lee Byron, Martin Wattenberg. Proceedings of InfoVis 2008.
Taggle: Scalable Visualization of Tabular Data through Aggregation. Katarina Furmanova, Samuel Gratzl, Holger Stitz, Thomas Zichner, Miroslava Jaresova, Alexander Lex, Marc Streit. Information Visualization, 19(2): 114-136, 2019

Lecture 13 - Hierarchies/Trees

Date: February 27, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 9 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
Treevis.net: A Tree Visualization Reference. Hans-Jorg Schulz, IEEE CG&A, 31(6), pp. 11-15, Nov.-Dec. 2011.
See also: A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization. InfoVis 2010 Best Poster.

Optional Reading:

Cushion Treemaps: visualization of hierarchical information. Jack J. van Wijk and Huub van de Wetering, Proc InfoVis 1999, pp 73-78.
Focus+Context Display and Navigation Techniques for Enhancing Radial, Space-Filling Hierarchy Visualizations. John T. Stasko, Eugene Zhang, INFOVIS 2000: 57-65
Graph Visualization and Navigation in Information Visualization: A Survey. Ivan Herman, Guy Melançon, M. Scott Marshall, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 6(1): 24-43 (2000)

Lecture 14 - Graphs

Date: March 04, 2025

Required Reading:

Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data. Danny Holten, Proc InfoVis 06, published as IEEE TVCG 12(5), p 741-748, 2006.

Optional Reading:

Visual Exploration of Multivariate Graphs. Martin Wattenberg, Proc. CHI 2006.
HOLA: Human-like Orthogonal Network Layout. S. Kieffer, T. Dwyer, K. Marriott, and M. Wybrow. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 22(1): 349–358, Jan. 2016.
A technique for drawing directed graphs. Emden R. Gansner, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Stephen C. North, and Kiem-Phong Vo, IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 19(3), 214-230, 1993.
Visual Analysis of Large Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Future Research Challenges. Tatiana von Landesberger, Arjan Kuijper, Tobias Schreck, Jörn Kohlhammer, Jarke J. van Wijk, Jean-Daniel Fekete, and Dieter W. Fellner. Computer Graphics Forum 30:6 (2011), 1719-1749.
Murray, Chapter 11 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)

Lecture 15 - Cartography

Date: March 06, 2025

Required Reading:

Munzner, Chapter 8.1-8.3 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)
Unfolding the Earth: Myriahedral Projections. Jarke J. van Wijk, The Cartographic Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp.32-42, February 2008. See also Additional Media.

Optional Reading:

Surprise! Bayesian weighting for de-biasing thematic maps.. Michael Correll and Jeffrey Heer. IEEE TVCG, 23(1), 651-660, 2016.
The Evolution of Thematic Cartography/A Research Methodology and Historical Review. Alan M. MacEachren. The Canadian Cartographer 16:1 (1979), 17-33.
Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization. Maneesh Agrawala and Chris Stolte, SIGGRAPH 2001.
Bostock, Command-Line Cartography
Murray, Chapter 12 (Note: the textbook is available electronically through the UA Library for those on campus)

Design Critiques
Assigned/Due: Rolling

P01 - Proposal
Assigned: Jan 28
Due: Feb 25 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Mar 04

P02 - Progress Update
Assigned: Feb 25
Due: Apr 01 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Apr 11

P03 - Project Presentation
Assigned: Apr 01
Due: Apr 29 11:59:59 PM
Graded: May 04

P04 - Final Report
Assigned: Apr 03
Due: May 06 11:59:59 PM
Graded: May 14

A00 - Survey
Assigned: Jan 16
Due: Jan 23 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Jan 30

A01 - D3 Basics
Assigned: Jan 23
Due: Feb 06 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Feb 13

A02 - SPLOMs
Assigned: Feb 06
Due: Feb 20 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Feb 27

A03 - Parallel Coordinates
Assigned: Feb 20
Due: Mar 06 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Mar 13

A04 - Treemaps
Assigned: Mar 06
Due: Mar 27 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Apr 03

A05 - Transfer Functions
Assigned: Mar 27
Due: Apr 10 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Apr 17

A06 - Flow Visualization
Assigned: Apr 10
Due: Apr 24 11:59:59 PM
Graded: May 01