CS 889 Advanced Topics in HCI: Information Visualization

Data Sources

• Data is Plural – newsletter (and podcast) curating interesting datasets
• Our World in Data | World Bank Open Data – socioeconomic data
• Gapminder Foundation – socioeconomic + public health data
• Tableau Public – Tableau Public is free, and other Tableau applications are free for students
• Statistics Canada | Canada Open Data

Visualization Development

Read this primer on Visualization Tools and Libraries by Krist Wongsuphasawat and consult Andy Kirk’s Chartmaker Directory.

Web-based Visualization Development*

• D3.js – low-level, modular, imperative set of libraries (paper)
  • Recommended book: Scott Murray’s Interactive Data Visualization for the Web (2nd edition)
• Vega-Lite – declarative JSON-based visualization grammar (paper) (or Altair for Python)
• Encodable – framework-agnostic grammar for Typescript inspired by Vega-Lite
• Deck.gl – GPU-powered framework for large datasets (or pydeck for Python)
• p5.js – low-level graphical primitives, animation loop (a descendent of Processing)
• Shiny – create web-based interactive data applications in R or Python
• Three.js and A-Frame for 3D visualization

* … there are many front-end frameworks to consider these days when working in Typescript / Javascript… however, it’s worth noting that Svelte plays particularly nice with visualization libraries…

Low- / No-code Visualization Design Applications**

• Tableau (free for students)
• Microsoft Power BI (accessible via uWaterloo’s Office365 subscription?)
• Flourish (now a Canva product)
• DataWrapper

** … useful for prototyping… but beware, these tools still have a considerable learning curve!

Immersive Visualization Development

• Anu.js – Babylon.js + WebXR
• SpatialStrates for WebXR (incorporates DashSpace)
• VRIA – web-based framework for creating immersive analytics experiences
• IATK – immersive analytics toolkit
• DxR – Immersive Visualization toolkit for Unity

Immersive Visualization Applications

• Flow Immersive – collaborative, cross-platform data storytelling