The amount and complexity of information produced in science, engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at staggering rates. The goal of this course is to expose you to visual representation methods and techniques that increase the understanding of complex data. Good visualizations not only present a visual interpretation of data, but do so by improving comprehension, communication, and decision making.
In this course you will learn about the fundamentals of perception, the theory of visualization, good design practices for visualization, and how to develop your own web-based visualizations using HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and D3.
The course begins by bootstrapping your web development skills, moves on to fundamentals of perception, introduces data types you will encounter, and then focuses on visualization techniques and methods for a broad range of data types. An integral component of the course are regular design critiques and design studios that will hone your skills in understanding, critiquing and developing visualization techniques.
The course is offered in the fall term 2015 at the University of Utah in two variants: CS-5630 for undergraduates and CS-6630 for graduate students, with a special section of CS-6630 (002) designated for data certificate students. Classes start on Tuesday, August 25. All classes are streamed live and archived online.
Instructor
Alexander Lex, alex@sci.utah.edu Office: WEB 3887
Guest-Lecturer
Teaching Assistants
Alex Bigelow Zinnia Mukherjee Anirudh Narasimhamurthy Jonathan Dunstan
Logistics
Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday 9:10-10:30 am, L101 WEB Online discussion: We use Piazza for discussions and questions. Please sign up with your utah.edu e-mail address. Office Hours: See this calendar. Live Video: YouTube Channel Archived Video: YouTube Playlist
Previous Versions of this Class
If you want to look ahead in the class you can browse two different classes that were offered in the past. This class takes inspiration from both of them:
Harvard CS 171 2015 Instructor: Alexander Lex http://cs171.org/2015/ Live Video (choose CSCI E-171) Video Archive
Utah CS-5630/CS5660 2014 Instructor: Miriah Meyer http://www.sci.utah.edu/~miriah/cs6630/