CS 889 Advanced Topics in HCI: Information Visualization
This seminar-based course will be an examination of information visualization in scenarios of communication and collaboration between people: using visualization to inform, explain, persuade, entertain, reach a consensus, or some combination of these intents. Weekly student-led research seminars, and collaborative design exercises will prepare students with the necessary skills to undertake a substantial final project.
This site is the public-facing summary of the course - University of Waterloo students can view the full course page here via outline.uwaterloo.ca (watID required)
Audience
This course has no prerequisites. Given visualization’s multidisciplinary underpinnings (information design, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, statistics, databases, cognitive and organizational psychology), a variety of backgrounds and research interests are welcome. With respect to aptitudes that will be useful for this course:
Strong English communication skills (reading, speaking, and writing) are important for success in this course: there are substantial reading, writing, discussion, and presentation components in the required work.
Prior coursework in human-computer interaction and user interfaces and / or prior industry experience with respect to information design and / or user interface {design | development | evaluation} will be helpful but not required.
Students with expertise in a particular application domain (e.g., bioinformatics, privacy, computer systems, etc) are welcome especially if they plan to incorporate information visualization into their thesis projects.
This is predominantly a seminar-based course that does not teach visualization libraries / toolkits. Students are expected to learn and use appropriate libraries / toolkits as needed for their projects.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course students should be able to...
- Claim a foundational understanding of information visualization’s multidisciplinary underpinnings along with its theories and processes.
- Be conversant in the topics, approaches, and methods of communication- and collaboration-themed visualization research.
- Identify and reason about conventions in contemporary visualization practice, including deceptive and unethical visualization design choices.
- Demonstrate a capacity to design, develop, and use visualization applications.
- Articulate a critical position on visualization research papers and practitioner projects: summarize, interpolate between, and extrapolate from them.