Sep 2016 Data Visualization for Journalists (JRNL 520H. Special Topics in Contemporary Journalism:
Data Visualization)
Instructors: Tamara Munzner, Caitlin Havlak
Classes: Tue Sep 13 - Tue Oct 18 (1.5 credit module)
Time/Location: Tue 9:30-12:30, Sing Tao Bldg Room 104
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Short Syllabus |
Detailed Syllabus |
Structure |
Resources
Short Weekly Syllabus
Detailed Syllabus
Syllabus subject to change.
Week 1: Tue Sep 13
Lecture: Intro, Tasks & Data, Marks & Channels
Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote
Lab: Lab 0 Pre-Assignment
Assignment: Tableau Install (do before first lecture)
Lab: Lab 1 Demos/Assignment
Demos: Basic Visual Encoding, Vancouver Crime, Vancouver Elections
Assignment: Music Sales
Further Reading
- VAD Ch 1: What's Vis and Why Do It?
- VAD Ch 2: What: Data Abstraction
- VAD Ch 3: Why: Task Abstraction
- VAD Ch 5: Marks and Channels
- Perception in
Vision web page with demos, Christopher Healey.
- Visual Thinking for Design. Colin Ware. Morgan Kaufman, 2008.
Week 2: Arrange Tables Tue Sep 20
Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote
Links:
xkcd Correlation,
NYT Ebb and Flow of Movies (streamgraph),
Alberto Cairo's blog post on misleading dual axes on chart about Planned Parenthood
Lab: Lab 2 Demos/Assignment
Demos: Back to the Future, Arrests Premiere League, Market Share
Assignment: Superstore, Connected Scatterplots (US minimum wage data)
Further Reading
Week 3: Color, Spatial Data Tue Sep 27
Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote
Links:
xkcd Heatmap,
Cairo blog post on population maps, Kirk's defending post,
Ben Jones Tableau Public site: Are Maps of Financial Variables Just Population Maps?
Lab: Lab 3 Demos/Assignment
Demos: Stone Color, Intro to Maps
Assignment: Drought, Analysis and Story for Chosen Dataset
Demos
- ColorBrewer color
palette/ramp chooser
- rehue color blindness simulator
- coblis color blindness simulator
- etre color blindness simulator
Further Reading
- VAD Ch 10: Map Color and Other Channels
- VAD Ch 8: Arrange Spatial Data
- Get
It Right in Black and White. Maureen Stone. Functional Color, 2010.
A Field Guide To Digital
Color, Maureen Stone, AK Peters 2003. Or, Stone's VIS 2005 Color course notes
Week 4: Manipulate, Facet, Reduce Tue Oct 4
Slides: pdf, pdf 16up, keynote
Links: LineUp demo (reordering), Animated Transitions in Statistical Graphics video, LiveRAC video (semantic zooming),
Constellation video (semantic zooming), Cerebral video (dynamic layering)
Lab: Lab 4 Demos/Assignment
Demos: Seattle Construction, Internet Use, House Price Index
Assignment: House Price Index Wrapup, Make Story Interactive, Proposal
Further Reading
- VAD Ch 11: Manipulate View
- VAD Ch 12: Facet Into Multiple Views
- VAD Ch 13: Reduce Items and Attributes
Week 5: Rules of Thumb, Wrangle Tue Oct 11
Slides (rules): pdf, pdf 16up, keynote.
Slides (wrangling): pdf, pdf 16up
Links: NYT
3D Yield Curve, Trifacta
Wrangler, Open Refine
Lab: Lab 5 Demos/Assignment
Demos: Wrangling tutorial, simple survey
Assignment: Angus Reid survey
Further Reading
Week 6: Stories, Networks, Vis in Newsrooms Tue Oct 18
Slides (Networks): pdf, pdf 16up, keynote.
Lab: Lab 6 Demos/Assignment
Links
- Networks
- Vis in Newsrooms
- Beyond This Class
- More Tableau
- Tools Beyond Tableau
- Videos
- Blogs
- Jobs
- Other
Further Reading
Structure
- Overview:
This course will teach you to analyze and design computer-based visual representations of
data, in order to help people perform some task more
faster or more effectively. It will emphasize visualization for
presentation but will also cover visualization for exploration and
enjoyment, since many of the same underlying principles hold in all
three cases. It will cover both static and interactive approaches.
- Audience:
There are no prerequisites, and you are not assumed to have a
programming background.
- Timing:
The 1.5 credit module will run over six weeks, with one three-hour
class each week. There will be six assignments, with each released one
week and due the next (except for the last one covering two weeks). You will start on the assignment in the
lab, and continue on your own. Core material is covered in the lecture
segment of the course and there are no required readings. There is no
final exam. The standard format for each session is
- 80 min: foundations lecture/discussion
- 15 min: break
- 45 min: demos
- 35 min: lab
- Marking:
The breakdown of marks for the course is
- 90% Assignments (6 of them)
- Assignments 1-5: 60% total. 15% each, lowest of these five marks will be dropped
- Assignment 6: 30%, two weeks to complete
- 10% Participation
- Participation:
We expect you to attend class. If you must miss class you should
send both of us email with an explanation; this email should be in advance not
after the fact, unless the problem is illness or emergency.
Resources
- Further Readings
- Vis Theory Book: Visualization Analysis and Design, Tamara
Munzner (A K Peters Visualization Series, CRC Press, 2014) is further
reading for many of the topics covered in lecture.
- Tableau Book: Communicating Data with
Tableau, Ben Jones (O'Reilly Press, 2014) is
further reading for hands-on work with Tableau.
- Research Papers:
Some further readings
are research papers available online, links will be posted above.
For digital library access from off-campus, use
EZproxy with your CWL login through the UBC library.
- Software and Data:
- Previous Versions of Course: Sep 2015
Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Tue Oct 18 04:01:29 PDT 2016