I have been a guest lecturer at the University of Potsdam now and again. My next seminar starts on Friday, the 30th of April and is about visualization for information, dealing mainly with infographics.

The course is open for graduate students of all disciplines, but will mostly appeal computer science students as it will be a bit heavy on data visualization. As a communication scientist, I have been dealing with this in regards to visualization of speech and visualization of network data. (remember the funky colorful internet visualizations back in the days?)

Most of what the course will be dealing with is stuff I have only learned recently (in the last 2-3 years). It may be a bit cheap to start teaching this stuff already, but it is a seminar, so all knowledge will be gained interactively. I do have some background on visualization though  (granularity, graphs, ui principles etc).

The course includes a project and is worth 6 credit points. As I am unfamiliar with the recent BA/MA system (and dont particularly care), you’d have to take a look at the UP guides yourself to see whether that is worth your time. I can just tell you that there will be some assignments and we will work together to create some infographics. Check out the website of the chair for detailed info on the formal stuff. The course number is #640. (Btw, if there are no English-speaking folks, it’ll be in German.)

Some of the questions we will be exploring together:

• How can information be visualized?
• What is a good visualization?
• How do we use visualization in our own work?

These questions are quite general and are the common theme throughout the seminar. There are, of course, also some topics I will be teaching directly:

• How does visual perception work?
• How do we process information?
• What are the principles of information visualization?
• What kind of / types of visualizations exist?
• What methods and tools are available?
• Why do we need to visualize?

So, as you can guess by the questions, we will be dealing with people like Tufte and Yantis. Here are a few recommended books. I will be posting a literature list and the full curriculum shortly:

• Envisioning Information
• The Information Design Handbook
• Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
• Information Visualization. Perception for Design.: Perception for Design
• Visual Thinking: For Design
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

There is no need to buy those if you want to attend the class. I will have handouts and create som excerpts. However, I can recommend those books to anyone who seriously wants to focus on this topic. By the way, thanks to Prof. Dr. Klaus Rebensburg for the opportunity to teach this course. I have been working with and for him since 2001 and am really looking forward to the discussions.