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
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.
- BBC, “The Beauty of Maps”, (Video Documentary), BBC. (2010).
- Sanders, D. H., “Why do Virtual Heritage”, (2008)
- http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/virtualheritage/ Access on 1/8/2011.
- Santiago, I. T. F., “Data Visualization in Archaeology (Intra-Site Applications)”, (2007) http://www.scribd.com/doc/29891514/Data-Visualization-in-Archaeology-Intra-Site-T-Feliciano Access on 31/8/2011
- Santiago, I. T. F., “Multivariate Geovisualization of archaeological events using the Space-Time Cube”, International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observations. Enschede, The Netherlands. (2008).
- Schniedewind, W., “The Qumran Visualization Project”, (2005) http://www.nelc.ucla.edu/qumran/about.html Access on 1/8/2011.