Instructor
Office: LWSN 3154P
Office hours: Tue/Thur 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Email: xmt@purdue.edu
Time and Location
Tuesdays/Thursdays: 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm
Wilmeth Active Learning Center B091 (until Nov 24)
Course Description
Unfathomable amounts of data are constantly produced and collected in all aspects of human activities. While computational approaches can automatically search for increasingly complex features in this data, actual insight often requires the active involvement of a human in the analysis loop where her cognitive and inference abilities are invaluable. Visualization, in other words computer-generated interactive visual data representations, plays a crucial role in this context, by affording the analyst a powerful basis for interpretation, discovery, and decision making. In addition, visualization permits to communicate data to non-specialist audiences in an intuitive and engaging way.
The course offers an introduction to the fundamental principles, design strategies, and techniques needed to visually communicate, explore, and analyze data. The course focuses primarily on the visual representations of inherently non-spatial data. Typical examples of such data include tables, graphs, trees, text, maps, time series, etc... The lectures will present a general methodology to design effective visualizations. We will also discuss the most prominent information visualization techniques and analyze their strengths and limitations in practical scenarios. Students will gain hands-on experience by visualizing real world datasets using advanced visualization software and open source libraries. The course material is self-contained and no graphics background is required.