Data Visualization

Data visualizations are a powerful tool for gaining knowledge, discovering hidden relationships and patterns, communicating messages, and influencing others’ opinions and values. Visualizations help inform our personal decisions (Where will I go to college? Can I afford this housing?), community decisions, and societal decisions (How do we respond to climate change? Pandemics?). But if we cannot communicate our message clearly, a visualization’s usefulness decreases and it can even be detrimental to our goals. In this course, students learn the fundamentals behind using graphs and charts to visually communicate ideas and gain practical experience with creating their own visualizations. We discuss the theory of visual communication, how the brain processes visual information, technical aspects of visualization implementation, ethics of data visualization, and data visualization research. Assignments consist of programming projects in Javascript with the D3 library. The class has a midterm and a final project (no final exam). Prerequisites: COMS W3134 (or equivalent). Experience with programming in Javascript is strongly recommended.