Professor Christopher Andrews
Office 634 McCardell Bicentennial Hall
Email candrews@middlebury.edu
Course Website http://www.cs.middlebury.edu/~candrews/classes/infovis or go/infovis/
Lectures MW 9:05a-9:55p, MBH 220
Discussion forum https://piazza.com/middlebury/spring2014/cs465/home
Office Hours
MW 10:30-11:30
TTh 3:30p-5:00p
or by appointment
Ward, Grinstein, and Keim, “Interactive Data Visualization: Foundations, Techniques, and Applications”, CRC Press, 2010.
Murray, “Interactive Data Visualization for the Web”, O’Reilly Media, 2013. available online
This course is intended to be a fairly broad, very hands-on introduction to information visualization. By the end of the class, I expect you to:
| Assignments | 70% |
| Participation | 10% |
| Final project | 20% |
I expect you to come to class, ask questions, and generally participate. However, participation also extends to use of Piazza. I expect one substantive post from each of you every week. This could be an answer to a fellow student’s question (provided it is substantive – not just ‘yes, that’s what I did’ or something similar), it could be a post about some example you found relating to what we were discussing in class, it could be a reply to someone else’s post, it could just be a discussion about some aspect of the lectures that you didn’t get. If I don’t see a lot of activity, I will get more formal about this requirement.
I want this to be a very hands on course. There will be no exams, instead most of your grade will come from assignments you do over the semester. There will be a number of small, week long assignments, and then you will do a larger final project, implementing a tool for exploring some data that particularly interests you. While we will be covering a lot of the “how” in the class, I want you to start thinking about the “what” as soon as possible. Think about large data sets that you might be interested in and what kinds of things you might want to learn. Ideally, this should be something that can be used more than once. Either the tool can be used for many data sets, or there is enough to explore within the data it is designed for that it is not a matter of running it once and getting a picture and that is the end of it.
We are going to be using Piazza for our class discussions outside of class. Rather than emailing questions to me, I encourage you to post the questions on Piazza. This will allow other students to answer questions and to benefit from the answers you receive. This system will only work if you use it, so please do so.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
- Pablo Picasso (or T.S. Elliot or Steve Jobs… its been stolen a few times)
Short version Help each other, but do not share code. Don’t present code you find as your own.
In computer science, we build on the work of developers before us. Most of us learned to code by copying code and finding ways to tweak it to do what we want. Almost no computer programs are built without building on the work of others, either in the form of algorithms, libraries, or even just short snippets of code.
On the other hand, there are questions of intellectual property and academic integrity. These are considerably murkier waters than you may face, for example, writing a history paper, or doing a problem set in math. With code, you can “accomplish” spectacular things by copying the right chunks of code without ever knowing how it works.
For the most part, navigating these waters is on your head. I encourage you to help classmates to debug misbehaving code. I encourage you to post questions (and answers!) on Piazza. But you need to do so in a way that respects other people’s work and in a way that contributes to your intellectual development rather than hindering it (or trying to mask your lack of it). This is not a race to get a good grade. The grade is at best a carrot to “trick” you into doing the work required to become better educated. As such, don’t just go looking for code that you can turn in to satisfy an assignment. You can probably find some, but it won’t help you much, and I’ll probably be able to tell (you will also get on my bad side very quickly, because grading work that wasn’t done by someone in the class is a waste of time).
So, as for actual policies? Do not work collaboratively unless indicated by the assignment. You can help one another, but I do not want to see identical assignments that differ only in the name at the top. If someone does show you code (as an explanation or asking for debugging help), do not copy it. Retain ideas, and go away and write your own version later. Attribute any ideas, etc, that you pick up (this goes for classmates, books, online resources, etc). Be explicit. Tell me where you got the idea, approach, technique, etc. Explain what your contribution was. Make sure that your contribution demonstrates that you understand what was not your work alone. Finally, if you have any doubts, just ask me first.
Students who need test or classroom accommodations due to a disability must be registered in advance with Student Accessibility Services. Please contact Jodi Litchfield (litchfie@middlebury.edu or 802.443.5936) for more information. Students who may need disability-related accommodations are encouraged to make an appointment with me as soon as possible. All discussions will remain confidential.