Education
Editors: Gitta Domik
Information Visualization Courses for Students
with a Computer Science Background
Andreas Kerren
Linnaeus University
E ducation is important to any emerging and
rapidly evolving discipline. This is certainly
the case for information visualization, with
its emphasis on the exploratory development
of knowledge. Over the past years, the visual
analysis of data has become the focus of many
people in academia and industry. Consequently,
students are more aware of visualization tech-
niques’ importance in addressing problems such
as the big-data challenge or information over-
load. This is reflected by the increasing number
of students who want to register for informa-
tion visualization courses at Linnaeus Univer-
sity (LNU). We started with only six students
in 2007; today, we regularly have more than 20
students registered for our basic information vi-
sualization course.
Teaching information visualization poses two
main challenges. On one hand, we must introduce
suitable technical foundations that require previ-
ous knowledge in various areas of computer sci-
ence, such as computer graphics, mathematics, or
human-computer interaction. On the other hand,
teaching principles of visualization users’ percep-
tual and cognitive capabilities is equally important
and a prerequisite for developing effective, useful
visualization approaches.
We’ve addressed these challenges in two infor-
mation visualization courses for computer science
students with programming experience. Here, we
briefly describe the syllabi, exercises, and practices
we developed for these courses. Similar reports ex-
ist for related fields such as visual analytics1 or
scientific visualization.2
The Courses
The LNU academic year runs on the quarter sys-
tem. We offer two master’s courses (http://cs.lnu.
se/isovis/courses) that each take place in the win-
ter and spring terms:
12 March/April 2013 Published by the IEEE Computer Society
and Scott Owen
■■
■■
Information Visualization (7.5 ECTS credits) and
Applied Information Visualization (7.5 ECTS
credits).
(ECTS stands for European Credit Transfer and Ac-
cumulation System.) We’ve provided these courses
since 2008. (In 2007, for organizational reasons, a
general course called Current Topics in Computer
Science covered the first course’s content.) Origi-
nally, we called these courses Information Visu-
alization I and II. We renamed them because we
noticed that students tend to avoid courses with
higher numbers.
Each course consists of 10 90-minute lectures;
lectures occur once or twice a week. Students
must have programming knowledge to finish the
practical exercises successfully. Information Visu-
alization requires 90 credits in computer science,
including basic courses in programming and data
structures and computer graphics, or the equiva-
lent. Applied Information Visualization requires
successful completion of Information Visualiza-
tion or an equivalent. Despite the relatively high
requirements, motivating students to take these
courses isn’t difficult.
The courses’ general learning goals are that stu-
dents should
■■ understand the basic principles that have in-
fluenced information visualization tools’ de-
velopment (such as perception or visualization
pipelines),
■■ have an overview of fundamental techniques
and systems,
■■ be able to choose suitable visualization tech-
niques for specific tasks,
■■ be able to critically evaluate and improve various
approaches, and
■■ have the background knowledge necessary to de-
velop new, innovative visualizations.
0272-1716/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE

It’s important to give students the opportunity
for critical reflection and to show the most re-
cent research directions. We discuss each techni-
cal approach and tool with respect to its value,
usefulness, and (if applicable) commercial use. Of
course, this is challenging and sometimes a bit
subjective because of missing quality metrics or
missing evaluations of tools and techniques.
The Syllabi
Many ways of organizing the course content ex-
ist.3 Our courses’ syllabi (see Tables 1 and 2) were
influenced partly by courses at Georgia Tech and
the Technical University of Vienna and by stan-
dard textbooks such as Information Visualization:
Perception for Design4 and Readings in Informa-
tion Visualization: Using Vision to Think.5 We also
recommend other books or chapters to students
for further reading and enrichment—for example,
Human-Centered Visualization Environments6 and
Information Visualization: Design for Interaction.7
Information Visualization
This course’s first four lectures discuss basic
knowledge important for designing information
visualizations and analyzing information visu-
alization concepts. We introduce the field, give
motivations for it, and present traditional and
modern examples. Then, we discuss perception
and cognitive issues. We provide information
about the perception of colors and textures, pre-
attentive visual processing, and Gestalt laws. This
course component is based mainly on Information
Visualization: Perception for Design. The fourth
lecture describes basics such as the information
visualization reference model (data tables, visual
mapping, interaction, and so on) and data types
and dimensionality. This lecture is based mostly
on Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vi-
sion to Think.
The remaining six lectures mainly present tech-
nical fundamentals. We first explain interaction
and then the visual structures for different data
types; this lets us directly refer to interaction tech-
niques without additional explanations. Students
accept this order and have no problem under-
standing the differences or correlations.
We discuss the most important interaction tech-
niques—for example, dynamic queries, zoom and
pan, overview and detail, and techniques related
to focus plus context. To exemplify the techniques,
we use both early and recent research papers. The
early papers often give more focused examples;
the recent papers present more complex or hybrid
techniques.
Table 1. Information Visualization Syllabus.
Lecture Topic
1 Introduction and motivation
2&3 Perception theory and cognition
4 Information visualization basics
5–7 Interaction
8 1D, 2D, 3D, and multidimensional data visualization
9 & 10 Hierarchy visualization
Table 2. Applied Information Visualization Syllabus.
Lecture Topic
1 Introduction and information visualization toolkits
2 Text and document visualization
3 Visualization of networks, including applications
4 Web visualization and biological-data visualization
5 Time series visualization
6&7 Software visualization
8 Visualizations for end users and collaboration
9 Visual analytics
10 Evaluation and the top 10 information visualization challenges
The lectures on visual structures introduce
visualization techniques for multivariate data
(projection-, axis-, glyph-, and pixel-based tech-
niques) and hierarchies (node-link and space-filling
approaches), mostly on the basis of research papers.
We save special data types for the next course.
Applied Information Visualization
This course’s first lecture summarizes the first
course’s most important elements and presents cur-
rent toolkits such as D3 (http://d3js.org) or Pro-
cessing (http://processing.org), which the students
can use in the practical exercises. The course fo-
cuses on special cases and domains and the practi-
cal application of the knowledge gained in the first
course. So, we address specific data types, such as
text and networks, and continue with visualization
techniques for domains such as biological data, the
Web, and software. Resources for these lectures are
current papers and articles and the second part of
Human-Centered Visualization Environments.
Recently, we added a lecture on visualization
for end users and collaboration and a lecture on
visual analytics. We did this because of our own
research interests and these fields’ increasing im-
portance and popularity.
The course concludes with a short presentation
on evaluation (methodologies and qualitative and
quantitative techniques) and the most important
information visualization challenges. The dis-
cussion of challenges gives an idea of the field’s
current state and open problems. Furthermore,
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 13
Education
it regularly motivates some students to choose a
thesis topic offered by our research group.
Study Materials
Our lecture notes are based mainly on our Power-
Point slides; students can download them from the
course webpages (access is restricted for copyright
reasons). The lectures cite many research papers,
some of which we selected from peer-reviewed
conference proceedings or journals for compulsory
assigned reading. These readings provide further
insight into a specific topic, such as software visu-
alization or visual analytics.
Videos of interaction scenarios showing infor-
mation visualization tools’ usability and interac-
tion capabilities are essential, as are tool demos.
They’re especially necessary to explain the dif-
ferent interaction techniques and their interplay
with visual structures. It’s fun to keep an eye on
the students during such demonstrations, and
these activities motivate the students to ask deeper
questions. However, videos and demonstration
tools aren’t always available. One large collection
of educational resources is Georgia Tech’s HCC
(Human-Centered Computing) Education Digital
Library (http://hccedl.cc.gatech.edu). Such reposi-
tories also facilitate the students’ preparation for
lectures and exams because they can watch the
videos again at home. Currently, we provide our
videos via Blackboard, a course management sys-
tem that LNU uses.
Exercises and Grading
Both courses are supported by a teaching assistant
(TA) who designs and organizes the exercises in
close collaboration with the responsible instructor.
For Information Visualization, the exercises are
more theoretical and conceptual. For example, stu-
dents may choose from several interesting datasets
(for instance, publicly available election results or
finance data). Then, they choose a suitable infor-
mation visualization technique or combination of
techniques and discuss their design choices’ pros
and cons. These exercises typically result in a brief
written report evaluating the techniques and their
effectiveness. Another typical exercise involves con-
sidering perception theory’s concrete consequences
for visualization approaches. The last exercise usu-
ally involves pairs of students implementing a
simple technique—for example, a basic treemap vi-
sualization with a few interaction features.
In Applied Information Visualization, the stu-
dents implement a more complex visualization
tool with more advanced interaction possibili-
ties. So, the exercises are actually small software
14 March/April 2013
projects. First, pairs of students get a nontrivial
(typically multivariate) dataset from the TA. They
give a short presentation explaining their funda-
mental visualization idea and the planned imple-
mentation. This presentation prevents them from
focusing too much on low-level details and en-
sures that the resulting tools are effective. After
implementing the tools, the students present and
discuss them.
Over the past years, we’ve often changed the
courses’ exercises. In 2007, each student chose a
research paper describing a recent approach, from
a group of papers that we preselected. The student
then reimplemented the fundamental approach
(not all the functionalities) and presented the re-
sulting tool. The instructors liked this exercise, pri-
marily because it related closely to their research,
but it was too challenging for many students.
The evaluation of theoretical exercises is straight-
forward but contains a nontrivial justification by
the TA. There are often several correct answers or
no correct answer for a specific task, such as iden-
tifying a design choice’s advantages and disadvan-
tages. This leads to more complex discussions with
students and more detailed feedback. We grade the
practical exercises on the basis of the implementa-
tion’s overall quality. That is, the instructor and
TA evaluate the time needed, the aesthetic aspects,
the level of effort (complexity), the usability, the
useful features the tool provides to analyze the
chosen dataset, and the oral presentation’s qual-
ity. Our courses end with a 30-minute individual
oral exam. The final grade is a combination of the
exercise and exam grades.
Course Reflection and Success Indicators
A key challenge of teaching these courses is the
students’ international background. Each student
brings his or her own knowledge and level of edu-
cation, even if he or she has fulfilled the course
requirements and has a solid background in com-
puter science or related disciplines. In this con-
text, the lectures and oral exam aren’t a problem
for students, but many students find the exercises
challenging. You might expect that culture-specific
habits or language characteristics might lead to
problems—for instance, in the description and
meaning of colors. However, we’ve never consid-
ered those issues a problem. An exception might
be the students’ different experiences with tasks
demanding critical thinking. On the other hand,
their math background and programming skills
might influence the exercise results more.
Student feedback has been positive overall, es-
pecially regarding the course content. A further
 Figure 1. The
Network Lens
supports the
visualization
of multivariate
node attributes
in the
context of an
underlying
network.
The student
thesis on this
topic led to
a published
conference
paper.9

success indicator is our students’ interest in con- www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~weiskopf/publications/

tinuing with a thesis related to our information
visualization research. After they finish their the-
ses, we encourage the best students to coauthor
papers for publication. Those papers are regularly
accepted as posters or fully fledged research papers
at well-known visualization conferences.8,9 Figure
1 shows a screenshot of a thesis project.
Another positive development is the increasing
interest in our courses from students from other
fields, such as signal processing or informatics.
This interest probably results from information
visualizations’ increased presence on the Internet.
Because those students typically have no program-
ming skills, they can’t register for the courses.
We’re thinking about changing the requirements
for Information Visualization and modifying the
exercises so that students without a computer sci-
ence background can take it.
cge_vis04.pdf.
3. A. Kerren, J.T. Stasko, and J. Dykes, “Teaching
Information Visualization,” Information Visualization:
Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives, LNCS 4950,
Springer, 2008, pp. 65–91.
4. C. Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for
Design, 2nd ed., Morgan Kaufmann, 2004.
5. S. Card, J. Mackinlay, and B. Shneiderman, eds.,
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to
Think, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
6. A. Kerren, A. Ebert, and J. Meyer, eds., Human-
Centered Visualization Environments, LNCS 4417,
Springer, 2007.
7. R. Spence, Information Visualization: Design for Inter­
action, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2007.
8. I. Jusufi, A. Kerren, and Y. Wang, “A New Radial
Space-Filling Visualization Approach for Planar st-
Graphs,” poster abstract presented at 2012 IEEE
VisWeek, 2012; http://cs.lnu.se/isovis/pubs/docs/

W
e hope this account of our experiences
will help others to set up information vi-
sualization courses or to relate their own courses
to ours.
kerren-visweek12.pdf.
9. I. Jusufi, Y. Dingjie, and A. Kerren, “The Network Lens:
Interactive Exploration of Multivariate Networks Using
Visual Filtering,” Proc. 14th Int’l Conf. Information
Visualization (IV 10), IEEE CS, 2010, pp. 35–42.

Andreas Kerren is a professor of computer science at Lin-

References
1. N. Elmqvist and D.S. Ebert, “Leveraging Multi­
disciplinarity in a Visual Analytics Graduate Course,”
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 32, no.
3, 2012, pp. 84–87.
2. M. Rotard, D. Weiskopf, and T. Ertl, “Curriculum
for a Course on Scientific Visualization,” 2004;
naeus University’s School of Computer Science, Physics and
Mathematics. He also heads the university’s Information
and Software Visualization group. Contact him at kerren@
acm.org.
Contact department editors Gitta Domik at domik@
uni-paderborn.de and Scott Owen at sowen@gsu.edu.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 15