VU Visualization - Homework 1
Visualization Critiques
Due: Friday, Mar 22nd 2013, midnight
- Individual Effort:
- No team participation is really encouraged in the case of the
homeworks or the labs.
- Late Submission:
- In general late submission is not encouraged unless there is a very
good reason.
Academic Misconduct
The use of visualization is pervasive in the media: explanatory
diagrams in magazines and textbooks, graphs describing statistics and
budgets, images showing spatial layouts of objects, new experimental
data plotted against theoretical expectations, etc. In each case, the
author of the visualization tries to convey a point of view by
emphasizing some aspects of the data while toning down other aspects.
The result can vary widely, from informative to misleading.
For this assignment, pick out two examples, one good and one bad
visualization, from one of the following published sources:
- Textbook
- Journal (Journal of Applied Optics, ...)
- Science magazine (Nature, Science, Scientific American, ...)
- News Magazine or newspaper (Newsweek, The Economist, NY Times, Globe
and Mail, ...)
Visualization textbooks and papers may not be used. Go to original
sources used by practitioners and researchers.
You may use any of the following application domains:
- Mathematics
- Physical sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc.)
- Biological sciences (ecology, medicine, bioinformatics, etc.)
- Engineering
- Medicine
- Social sciences (economics, crime statistics, etc.)
Your two examples do not need to come from the same source or application
domain.
Once you have selected a good and a bad example, describe them on a web page.
Include both pictures, references to their sources, and two paragraphs
for each picture:
- The first paragraph should tell the story behind the
picture: what does the picture show?
- The second paragraph should
critique the visualization, explaining why you think it is good or bad.
Be specific, and include criteria such as accessibility, clarity,
accuracy, or any aspect of the design that you feel is important. Review the design criteria we have talked about in class.
Send me both, the URL as well as a pdf version of your page by midnight, Friday Mar. 22. I intend to put the link to your web page up for the whole class to see.
Last modified: Oktober 2014
Torsten Möller /
torsten dot moeller AT univie DOT ac DOT at