Introduction to Data Visualization for the Web

MAY 2023

Overview

This is a selection of core course content for INFO474: Introduction to Data Visualization for the Web, a project based course I taught during 2021 and 2022 at the University of Washington. The structure and pacing of the course owes a debt to Jeff Heer's course for the CS department, from which the course was adapted with permission and which is available online here: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse442/22wi/

Textbooks & Core Resources

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Envisioning Information

History of Information Graphics

Visualization Analysis & Design

This website's collection of interactive tools: https://colinmegill.com/explorers

Tamara Munzner's Lectures from IEEE 2021 is extensive and covers most of her landmark book Visualization Analysis & Design.

The history of data visualization

Learn Recoil for client side state management: Learn RecoilJS in 10 minutes

Working with layouts, fonts and CSS: Web Design in 4 Minutes

Visualization utilities (scales, CSV parsers): Learn D3 — Wattenberger

Handling data in JS: Learn JS Data & Observable

React based visualization library: AirBnB VisX && blog post

UI Framework for data dense applications: BlueprintJS

Build system and application bootstrap: Vite.js

Host: How to deploy React Apps in less than 30 Seconds

Exploratory Data Analysis

A Gentle Introduction to Exploratory Data Analysis

Visualizing Distributions

Perception, attention and cognition

Interactivity

The best primers on the role of interactivity in visualization and complex applications, both in terms of philosophy and practice, are from Brett Victor's seminal writing and talks.

Magic Ink — PDF

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction: A Systematic Approach to Interactive Visualization — "This is simply one of the best guides I've seen to anything...ever."

Explorable Explanations

Tangle