INF8808/E is taught twice a year :
- Winter semester in French (INF8808)
- Short summer semester in English (INF8808E)
Content, syllabus and credits are the same for both versions. However, please note that the english version INF8808E is taught at double speed, during the so-called short summer semester (6 weeks from beginning of may to around mid-june).
Why you should follow this course
The quantity and complexity of data produced in our lives and all types of industrial activities are phenomenal. Presenting, understanding, analyzing, decision making are some of the of goals one can seek to achieve with such data.
A data visualization can be a powerful user-centred tool in that perspective, for a lot of data-based applications and contexts. However, if a visualization is poorly designed, the user can misinterpret the data and be misled in his conclusions, hence decisions.
The goal of the course is to teach you data visualization methods and techniques. Above all, you will learn the design process underlying the choice or design of a data visualization.
After this course, you will be able to:
- Apply good design practices, principles and strategies to create or choose effective visualization
- Understand your role as a dataviz designer
- Conduct an ideation process using sketching and prototyping
- Use perception and cognition principles to boost your visualization design
- Critically evaluate visualizations, suggest improvements and refinements, conduct scientific watch of the ongoing production of online dataviz
- Work as a member of a team during labs and a weeks long dataviz design project
- Implement interactive web-based visualizations using D3 or Plotly.
Examples below have been made by past students of the course (links for the interactive versions here). You can find also good examples of what you should be able to do here, here and here.
Prerequisites
In order to follow INF8808/E in good conditions, you should have a programming experience (any introductory course to programming). You should be comfortable learning new programming languages on your own. Having web development experience (HTML, CSS, Javascript) is a plus, but not required.
On the technical side, INF8808/E boils down to learn how to use the D3 library. Note that for that aspect, the course's labs are mostly flipped and thus strongly relies on your automony. Basically, reading and self-correcting sets of exercices prepare students prior to each lab period. Lectures on their side do not cover D3 and are solely focused on aspects of the design process.
Course broad organisation
The overall course organization is as follows. More details are given during the first lecture.Lectures
The class meets weekly for lectures, design activities, and invited industrial seminars (twice a week for INF8808E). Lectures do not cover D3 material and are solely focused on design aspects. Please arrive on time, as we will start most lecture sessions with a short graded quiz about the required readings.
Readings / Quizzes
Each lecture has assigned readings (that usually take around 30 minutes to do). These assigned readings should be done before class (flipped class style). A very quick online quiz is done the beginning of each lecture session to test your knowledge of the readings. Quizzes are part of your final grade (usually 8 quizzes for a total of 16%).
Labs
INF8808/E labs boil down to teach you how to use the D3 library. Note that labs are mostly flipped and thus strongly relies on your automony. Readings and self-correcting sets of exercices prepare students prior to each lab period. 5 different labs are covered during the first half of the semester. The second half of the semester is devoted to projects. Labs grades represent a total of 30% of the final grade.
Project
A major part of the course is a final group project. Projects are organised in several milestones (plan, sketches, etc.). Several kinds of projects can be done in terms of topic, either based on the group choice, or proposed by several companies the course collaborate with (e.g. for winter 2020 edition: Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, Anagraph, CIRANO, Entralpi, Voilà, and few Polytechnique internal services).
Slack discussions
Students are invited to discuss on the course Slack server where a channel is devoted to fruitful sharing and criticizing of visualizations. One participation per week is expected for each student (6% grade).
Homework
An individual homework has to be done during the semester and counts for 10%. It usually consists in a visualization critic.