Visual Analytics
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SCHOOL OF INTERACTIVE ARTS + TECHNOLOGY [SIAT] | WWW.SIAT.SFU.CA
July 30, 2015
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Why?
 We
are in a new era of human history:
 Since 1994 we have witnessed an
information explosion. (duh)
– Everyone can get all of the data that’s out
there
• News, sports, financial, purchases, etc...
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Kegs of data
 Between
1.8 zettabytes of unique data
produced per year
– 1800000000000000000000 (1021) bytes
– 300 gig for every person
– Printed documents only .003% of total
Lyman and Varian, 2000
Cal-Berkeley, Info Mgmt & Systems
www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info
– 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009
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Unlike Before…

Used to be (20 years ago), you had to go to a
library
– read the info, put it on some sort of storage device,
take notes, run a specialized program
– On a computer 1000 times slower than today

Now:
– How do we make sense of the data?
– How do we harness this data in decision making
processes?
– How do we avoid being overwhelmed?
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The only reasonable solution
 Computing
+ Human Vision
– Highest bandwidth sense
– Fast, parallel
– Pattern recognition
– Extends memory and cognitive capacity
– Many People think visually
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Questions:
– Which state has the highest income?
– Is there a relationship between income and education?
– Are there any outliers?
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College Degree %
Spotfire: Visualize the data
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Per Capita Income
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Visualization
It’s tempting to think that Visualization is about
pictures
 Really, it’s a tool to help you think about a
problem and learn something

– A cognitive process helped by pictures
– “The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures”
• Fred Brooks, quoting Claude Shannon
– Insight: discovery, decision making, explanation
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Main Idea
 Visuals
help us think
– Provide a frame of reference, a temporary
storage area
 External
cognition
– Role of external world in thinking and reason
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Information Visualization
 What
is “information”?
– Items, entities, things which do not have a
direct physical correspondence
– Notion of abstractness of the entities is
important too
– Examples: baseball statistics, stock trends,
connections between criminals, car
attributes...
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What is “Visualization”?
 The
use of computer-supported,
interactive visual representations of data
to amplify cognition.
– From [Card, Mackinlay Shneiderman ‘98]
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Scientific Visualization
 This
is a branch of Visualization that helps
people understand things that have a
built-in geometry.
– Fluid flow past a ship hull
– Volume rendering of human body
– Weather in BC
– Forces on a turbine blade
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SciVis vs InfoVis
 With
SciVis: you have the geometry
already
 With InfoVis: Must create a mapping from
Information to geometry
– Map info to 2D or 3D space
– Give the info a visual representation
 Both:
data
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Enable interaction with the visual
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Domains of Info Vis
 Text
 Statistics
 Financial/business
data
 Internet information
 Linkages between various things
 Software
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Earth
S America
N America
Europe
Asia
Africa
North America
USA
Canada
Mexico
Canada
…
BC
AB
ON
QC
British Columbia
Vancouver
Uni Dr
Surrey
102nd Avenue
Holland Park
250 - SIAT
…
King George
Central Mall
Surrey
…
102nd Avenue
…
250 - SIAT
How does it work ?
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Cooking-Exchange
network
Example Visualizations
 Are
these following static pictures
information visualizations?
– And if so, how good are they?
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Excel
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USA Today Graphics
 What’s
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right/wrong with this pic?
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YVR
 Flash
Map:
– Moves car!
– cameras give 360
view
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YVR Now
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Unemployment rates
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Ancient Europe
 The
Tabula Peutingeriana
– Around 350AD (Shows Constantinople)
– Shows road network of Roman Empire
– Highly distorted
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Ancient Europe
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London Underground
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Actual Geography
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www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/tubegeo.gif
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Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia
A redrawn version of Minard’s map showing some data more clearly than in
the original
Source: http://www.napoleanic-literature.com, © John Schneider
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Florence Nightingale’s diagram showing the dramatic reduction in death
rates in the hospitals of Scutari following the changes she introduced
Source: Nightingale (1858)
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Part of John Snow’s original map in which each death from cholera
is indicated by a black bar. The dotted line encloses the area that was closer
to the Broad street pump (in walking distance) than to any other street
pump
Figure 1.3
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Source: Cholera Inquiry Committee, St. James parish. Report on the cholera outbreak in the parish of St. James, Westminster, during the autumn of 1854. London,
J Churchill, 1855. Map 3. Thanks: Brock Craft
SmartMoney MarketMap
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Inxight StarTree
 Hyperbolic
mapping of tree
http://thejit.org/static/v20/Jit/Examples/Hypertree/example1.html
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Sunburst File Browser

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/sunburst/
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HomeFinder HCIL U Maryland
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Data too large for paper &
pencil
(a)
A table associated with the exploration of potentially useful drugs may
involve many rows corresponding to compounds and fourteen columns
associated with specific properties. Gaining insight into such a table is difficult
Figure 1.7(a)
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(b)
The visual encoding of the table data can enhance understanding. In
this example a property ‘ID’ is plotted against ‘Assay1’. Colour and shape both
encode the passing or failure of a purification test, and size encodes molecular
weight. Identification of one compound reveals its molecular structure
Figure 1.7(b)
Source: Courtesy of Spotfire Inc.
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Knowledge Seeking Tasks

Search
– Were is the local White Spot?
– What is Bob’s phone number?

Browsing
– Who was Augustus Caesar…Ancient Rome… Roman
Baths…. Where can I visit one on my next trip to
Europe… Maybe I can see the real copy of that
ancient map…
– Who wrote the recommendation letter, and what are
her research papers and how good are they?
• Maybe I’ll read a few
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Tasks in InfoVis
 Analysis
– Comparison, difference, similarity
– Find Patterns, relationships, regularities
– Find Outliers, Extremes
 Assimilation
 Monitoring
 Awareness
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