Data Visualization Software [CYIM, Spring 2022]

Course Description

Charts and diagrams with colors and objects of different sizes can better reveal information at a glance than spreadsheets full with numbers can. Hans Rosling's TED talk uses the population and life expectancy of countries in the world to tell the history and to demonstrate this point. In this course we learn to do the same with free software tools. Some theoretical background is needed to explain how humans respond to different visual cues and effects. This will help us choose more expressive types of charts or diagrams in accordance with different types of data to be visualized. Sometimes command line tools such as html2csv, textql, jq, and fx may be needed to pre-process text files of different format (such as html, xml, or json) into csv or other simple formats so that diagram drawing software can import them. We then learn free software tools such as gnuplot, scatplot, and grafana to create scatter plots (bubble charts) and other common diagrams. Relational data such as function dependency in a program can be visualized using graphviz. Geospatial data in gpx/kml/geojson format may be visualized using GeoDa and QGIS. Finally, high dimensional data such as those gathered from deep learning networks can be visualized through dimension reduction techniques such as Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection.

Grading

  1. In the class, there will be easy assignments almost every week, for which you can ask classmates for verbal help. These account for roughly 45% of total grades.
  2. There are also 3 to 5 quizzes which together account for roughly 45% of total grades. The quizzes are in the form of blank-filling questions. (But in reality they are more like matching questions.)
  3. Term project
  4. Class participation and attendence account for 10% of total grades.
  5. Total grade = \( \frac{ \sum_i \mbox{your $i$-th grade} }{ \sum_i \mbox{full grade for $i$-th quiz or assignment} } * 100 \) For a quiz or assignment where you ask for leave, "full grade for i-th quiz or assignment" is replaced by "full grade for i-th quiz or assignment * \( \mu \)" \( \mu \) is roughly 0.3. It means that the more leaves you ask for, the worse it will adversely affect your total grades.

Important Notes:

  1. Cheating behaviors in quizzes are strictly forbidden and will result in failing the class.
  2. If you cannot come to the class, you must ask for a personal day off before the class. This is most important especially for those classes when we have quizzes.

Other Notes:

  1. Please prepare a usb flash drive for installing linux.
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