CS397 Information Visualization

Explore WCMA is a way to find pieces in the collection that you haven’t seen before by following an artwork’s connections through exhibits. You can also get a quick sense of the color scheme of each exhibit! This blog post will document how this visualization came to be. First Steps I had worked with the... [Read More]

Processing exhibition data In addition to the visual features from last time, I’ve also processed exhibition data to get a better sense for how pieces may be related to each other. I used NetworkX to construct a graph where each node represents a work of art in the collection and an edge between two nodes... [Read More]

As mentioned in the previous post, I want to start getting more information about the visual properties of artworks in the WCMA collection. The WCMA collection includes a set of thumbnails that I will be processing. Not every object in the collection has a thumbnail, but I will be able to learn more about the... [Read More]

Going forward I will be working with the WCMA dataset. There is a good amount of data, and it will give me good experience with analyzing datasets and figuring out where and how visualization can be used. I have done some previous basic visualizations with data from this dataset, but I hope to dig deeper... [Read More]

This week I am using C3, a D3-based library that makes generating basic charts much easier. This will allow me to get a better grasp of both the WCMA dataset, as well as get more practice making web visualizations. Artwork Classifications Originally I wanted to do a count of the mediums, but upon looking at... [Read More]

Overall takeaway from the following readings: get a good understanding of the problem domain and the goal of the visualization. Heuristics are a good way of evaluating prototypes, but they are not sufficient; ideally, conducting ethnographic research with the end users or audience provides the clearest idea of how good the visualization is. Information Visualization... [Read More]

Information visualizations need to have an audience, and it is important for us to keep in mind who our audience will be. If we have a message that we want to communicate, we should make sure that everyone is able to receive and understand that message. By making our visualizations accessible, we will be able... [Read More]

It’s not quite September anymore, but I figured the September #SWDChallenge would be a good way for me to practice evaluating a visualization and remaking it! The challenge contains several useful tips for evaluating graphs, as well as some questions to consider when thinking about the remake. I will be learning how to use Tableau... [Read More]

The October Storytelling with Data challenge is to find and visualize a dataset using a scatterplot. Scatterplots are a good way to visualize how two dimensions of a dataset are related. In addition to just plotting the points, however, a scatterplot can be highlighted in certain ways to make the message stronger. For example, the... [Read More]

A big part of information visualization is, of course, the data. This week I delve into examining datasets and how different types of visualizations may be better suited for different types of datasets. How should a certain dataset be visualized? What types of data shouldn’t be visualized? Examining the Dataset The first question to ask... [Read More]

The goal of the following visualizations is for me to get some practice using visualization tools and to get a feel for creating different types of visualizations. The Javascript is /f2018-info-vis/assets/basicvis/visualize.js I will be using the following dataset: [16, 28, 11, 3, 40, 10, 3, 34, 45, 34, 17, 26, 41, 45, 15, 0, 23,... [Read More]

A big part of information visualization is, of course, the visualization. A better understanding of how the human visual perceptive system works will enable more nuanced evaluations of visualizations and provide insights into creating effective visualizations. Perception This article by Christopher G. Healey is a very interesting read on human preattentive processing and gives example... [Read More]

This blog will document my independent study on information visualization. By the end of the semester, I hope to have gained a solid grasp of how and why information is visualized, as well as be able to both create and critically evaluate information visualizations. This introduction will be my first step into the field of... [Read More]