Visualization as Science 1

A look at the human visual system and the connection between the eyes and brain. Explore how we extract visual information for the environment and what that means for data visualization.

Lesson Table of Contents

Video
Written materials
Links
Exercise
Reading
Next
Works cited

Video

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Resources mentioned in the video can be found in links. Videos are hosted by Vimeo. You may disable Video Embeds or view the video on Vimeo.

Written materials

In addition to the video, you may also download slides from this lesson.

Exercise

Plot job satisfaction from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey using your preferred software. This can be done in spreadsheet software if desired! Your plot could be a bar chart, a scatterplot, a heatmap, etc. You don't need to plot all variables but, instead, can focus on a small subset of interest. Please provide 2 - 4 sentences describing how this representation uses pre-attentive features. You may use a simplified dataset I prepared for you or the original full dataset from Stack Overflow.

Note that the Zulip community is not available to this MOOC. Please consider sharing your exercise via social media such as Bluesky with the tag #OpenDataVizSciCourse.

Reading

We are getting a look at the Gestalt Principles through Gestalt - The Parts and the Whole by Extra Credits.

Next lecture

Ready to continue? Go to the next lesson.

Works cited

This is the works cited from the lecture. Note that additional sources may be used in exercises and other supporting documentation.

B. Adhikari, "Marey's train schedule," University of Missouri Saint Louis, 2021. Available: https://badriadhikari.github.io/data-viz-workshop-2021/minards/
S. Bell, "Introduction and Perceptual Elements of Colour," University of Saskatchewan. Available: https://openpress.usask.ca/introgeomatics/chapter/introduction-and-perceptual-elements-of-colour/
J. Harvey, "The evolution of the human eye," TED Ed, 2015. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrKZBh8BL_U
D. Camors, Y. Trotter, P. Pouget, S. Gilardeau & J. Durand, "Visual straight-ahead preference in saccadic eye movements," Nature Communications, 2016. Available: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23124
OSC Rice, "Vision," Washington State University. Available: https://opentext.wsu.edu/psych105nusbaum/chapter/vision/
"Vision," CourseHero. Available: https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/wmopen-psychology/outcome-vision/
E. Adelson, "Checker shadow illusion," Wikimedia, 2018. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion#/media/File:Checker_shadow_illusion.svg
DancingPhilosopher, "Mach Bands," Wikimedia, 2012. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:Mach_bands_-_animation.gif
US Department of Education, "College Scorecard," US Department of Education. Available: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/?sort=salary:desc&page=0&state=CA
C. Ware, "Information Visualization: Perception for Design," MK Press.
C. Ware, "Visual Thinking for Design," MK Press.