Resources

Other Infovis Courses

• Maneesh Agrawala's class at UC Berkeley, Fall 2013.
• Katy Borner's class at IU, 2013
• Sheelagh Carpendale's class at Calgary, 2012
• Marti Hearst's class at UC Berkeley, Spring 2008.
• Jeff Heer's class at UW, 2014
• Alfred Kobsa's class at UCI, 2002
• Miriah Meyer's class at Utah, 2012
• Tamara Munzner's class at UBC, 2011
• Chris North's class at Virginia Tech, 2009 and earlier
• Ben Shneiderman's class at UMD, 2011
• Anselm Spoerri's class at Rutgers, 2013
• John Stasko's class at Georgia Tech, 2013

Examples of Interactive Visualization Systems

• Animated bubble charts: Gapminder World and great videos on the Gapminder site
• maps: Netflix Map [NY Times 2010] and New York City Parking Map [NY Times 2008]

Data Visualization and Analysis Software and Toolkits

Visualization Toolkits

• d3 - JavaScript data visualization toolkit
• Prefuse - Visualization toolkit for Java
• Flare - Visualization toolkit for Adobe Flash
• Processing - Graphics and interaction language and IDE
• Protovis - JavaScript visualization language, predecessor of d3
• jQuery, Dojo, Google Maps API - helpful HTML/Javascript/XML libraries
• Tableau for Students - get Tableau free license as a student
• Tableau Public - free version of Tableau which publishes to the web
• PolyMaps - map displays with JavaScript & SVG
• Weave - web-based visualization platform
• Modest Maps - Mapping library for Flash
• Improvise - Java system supporting coordinated views
• ManyEyes - collaborative visualization from IBM

  Color Tools

• ColorBrewer - a tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics
• NASA Ames Color Tool - a tool designed to provide the designer with views of the perceptual relationships among the possible color choices

Scientific Visualization and Graphing Tools

• VTK - scientific visualization library (C++ with wrappers for other languages)
• VisIt - parallel interactive scientific visualization
• GGplot2 - graphics language for R
• GGobi - visualizations for multivariate data

Commercial and Older Products

• TreeMap - treemap software from UMD HCIL
• TimeSearcher - interface for time-series data from UMD HCIL
• Piccolo - A Java library for zoomable UIs, from the University of Maryland (Java and .NET)
• Other products - from UMD HCIL
• TreeMap software from the Hive Group - commercial product
• Thinkmap SDK, and some examples - commercial product
• The Infovis Toolkit - Java visualization toolkit from INRIA (2005)
• The Rivet Toolkit - visualizing complex systems
• Polaris Project - precursor of Tableau

Other Visualization Resources Pages

• Computational Reporting Datafest tool compilation
• Resources from Jeff Heer's infovis class at UW

Color

• Maureen Stone's list of color references
• NASA site on the use of color in information display
• Checklist for designing a color graphics page
• Designing with luminance contrast
• ColorBrewer - a tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics
• NASA Ames Color Tool - a tool designed to provide the designer with views of the perceptual relationships among the possible color choices

Data Sets

• World Bank Data Catalog
• 30 Places to Find Open Data on the Web - Visual.ly
• Civic Data Sets for the Pacific Northwest
• CDC NCHS Data - CDC's National Center for Health Statistics Data Access
• Machine Learning Repository - data sets maintained by UCI
• Office for National Statistics (UK) - repository of statistics about Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Infovis Collections and Commentary

• eagereyes.org - Robert Kosara's blog
• infosthetics.com - Information Aesthetics
• Infovis.net
• Visual Complexity - Visualizing complex networks
• Flowing Data
• treevis.net - Collection of tree visualizations from 1714 to the present
• Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. Forum
• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - Stephen Few's blog
• Information is Beautiful
• Datalysed
• Kelso Cartography
• Visual.ly
• Jonathan Harris' site including WordCount (Zipf distribution demo)
• Gallery of Data Visualization; The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics
• UMD On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments
• Gallery of Visual Illusions
• InfoVis wiki
• Georgia Tech Visual Analytics Library - lectures, homework, other material
• eigenfactor.org - citation maps
• Arthur Shapiro's Illusions - interesting demos of visual perception

Relevant Books, Journals, and Other Publications

Infovis Overviews

• Robert Spence, Information Visualization: Design for Interaction , 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2007.
• Chaomei Chen, Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon, 2nd ed., Springer, 2006.

Perceptual and Psychological Principles

• Colin Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 3rd ed., Morgan Kaufmann 2012.
• Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology , MIT Press, 1999.
• Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and Mind , Harvard University Press, 1986.

Graphic Design in Infovis

• Stephen Few's site, Perceptual Edge, as well as his books, Show Me the Numbers and Information Dashboard Design. We will use Now You See It as a textbook for this course.

• Stephen Kosslyn, Elements of Graph Design, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1993.

  Kosslyn is more like a cookbook or how-to guide and should be useful for people not very experienced with making graphs (although I think it is useful even if you are experienced; it puts a lot of your implicit knowledge explicitly in one place). Although it is light on the scientific justifications, it is written by a cognitive psychologist with considerable experience in the field.

• Maureen Stone, A Field Guide to Digital Color, A.K. Peters, 2003.

Information Visualization Research

• Stuart K. Card, Jock D. MacKinlay, Ben Shneiderman (Eds.) Readings in Information Visualization : Using Vision to Think , Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999 (good compiled collection of readings, but out of date).

• Knowledge and Information Visualization: Searching for Synergies, edited collection by Sigmar-Olaf Tergan, Tanja Keller, Springer Verlag, 2005.

• Parallel Coordinates: Visual Multidimensional Geometry and Its Applications, by Alfred Inselberg, Springer Verlag, 2009.

  Best conference for infovis research results:

• Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 1995-present. From campus machines you can access these online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org (Click on Conference Proceedings, then search on Visualization)

  Journals:

• International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Special Issue on Empirical evaluation of information visualizations, Vol. 53, No. 5, November 1, 2000.

• Information Visualization (Journal), Published by Sage.

Classics

• Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, 1983, 2nd ed., 2001.
• Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, 1990.
• Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, Graphics Press, 1997.
• Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, Graphics Press, 2006.

• William S. Cleveland, Elements of Graphing Data, Hobart Press, 1994.

• Jacques Bertin Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps, Esri Press, originally published 1967, reprinted 2010.

• Donis Dondis, A Primer of Visual Literacy, MIT Press, 1973.

Interesting Visualizations

• NationMaster
• Secret Lives of Numbers by Golan Levin
• Visual Illusions and Movement
• Interactive depiction of distribution of 2004 Democratic delegates
• TreeMaps applied to Online News
• Eigenfactor Gender Browser - Gender composition of academic publication authorship
• Arthur Shapiro's Illusions - many interesting interactive perceptual demos