COMP5048 – Introduction

August 3, 2011 § Leave a comment

[ This is a personal blog on the subject COMP5048 – Information Visualisation, taught in Computer Science, at USYD, by Seok-Hee Hong. ]

This has been a rather slow start for this subject. Not what I was expecting from a postgraduate subject, but it looks like (I hope) that the pace will pick up later on.

The first lecture gave some interesting points to the achievable, measurable, aesthetics of (abstract) information visualization, consider:

  • (edge) crossings
  • area
  • symmetry
  • edge length
  • bends
  • angular resolution
  • aspect ratio
Characteristics which could achieve readability, but are not completely separate from another (for example, one may not be able to minimize edge crossings and maximize symmetry at the same time).
Our first task was to analyse some visualisations, identifying their good and bad attributes in accordance to the measurable criteria aforementioned. The following are my (short) references of critiques from others.

Getting the hang of ArcGis

August 3, 2011 § Leave a comment


First week of ARCA2606, our lab consisted of becoming acustomed to the popular (and expensive) GIS (Geographic Information System) software; ArcGis.

Here’s some images that were generated in class with ArcGis.

(Messing around with different projections. This one caught my eye, (the Gaus Krugner projection), as it focused on a certain longitude (and consequently subsequent narrow strips of areas) ).

(Playing around with manipulating symbology. The circles (and color) represent population size at cities.)

(When inverted, the population-map could almost be compared to night-time satellite photographs of cities and their densities of light pollution.)

(A screenshot from the process of extracting lat-long (y-x) data from a spreadsheet into an ArcGis file. Quite messy with the amount of data points (side-note: google earth compensates for this visual clutter by showing text according to zoom level) And Wow! Europe has a lot of World Heritage sites!)

Also, a nice quote that stood out from the lesson was that “All maps are lies.” (See Mark Monmonier’s “How to Lie with Maps”), and that maps are constructed for certain purposes, as such, certain representations of abstract and physical information can differ as a result of their intended message.

ARCA2606 – Introduction

August 3, 2011 § 1 Comment

[ This is a student journal for the subject ARCA2606 “Maps, Time, and Visualisation”, taught in Archaeology at USYD by Ian Johnson and Andrew Wilson. ]

To start things off:

The Benefits of Visualisation.

Within archaeology (and history), visualization can, and has, made significant contributions to research and education.Visualizations help those especially unfamiliar with the area, to contextualize information, viewing it as a whole, rather than in it’s component parts. It utilizes young minds’ natural curiosity in discovering relationships in complex patterns, natural pattern recognition, which humans are inherently skilled at. Physical simulations, such as the “Lark Quarry Dinosaur Stampede” at the Australian Museum, demonstrate hypothesis grounded on fact to museum visitors (nearly half of which are comprised of school children). Integration with new technologies such as augmented reality also provides novel methods for children to experience these areas. In addition to streamlining the cognitive analysis of two and three-dimensional space, visualizations (many interactive) can facilitate a fourth dimension, time, whose relationship amongst the dimensions are often hard to grasp (Santiago, 2007).

Research has also benefited from maps and other forms of visualization. This is not only in reference to historic maps that can reveal social and cultural information, as witnessed in BBC’s “The Beauty of Maps (2010)”, but also to emerging uses of visualization through the combination of databases, gis, etc. These visualizations can aid in more thoroughly analyzing the samples of an area before commencing expensive and destructive excavations (Sanders, 2008). With computers, the mass amounts of stored information on artifacts and areas can be accessed to build visualizations with multiple variables; whoms relationships can be established with quick visual analyses (Santiago, 2008). Most importantly, visualizations such as simulations help test hypothesis and refute claims, as evidenced in UCLA’s Virtual Qumran project (Schniedewind, 2005).

References:

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