Welcome!
Welcome! This is the official webpage of METU STAT 112 course. The beneficial sources related to data processing and visualization will be shared here. Your projects will be also shared publicly through this page. |
Course Hours
Tuesday / 09.40-12.30 / P2
Thursday / 10.40-12.30 & 13.30-15.30 / YP-B201
Recitation Notes
Recommended & Visual Sources
Recommended & Additional Sources
Graphical Data Analysis with R (Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series) by Antony Unwin
Recommended Data Sources
Office for National Statistics (UK) - a repository of detailed statistics about Great Britain and Northern Irland
Machine Learning Repository - large variety of maintained data sets
CDC NCHS Data - CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Data Access
Recommended Speeches
Tools
Visualization Toolkits
A variety of useful toolkits have been designed to help support information visualization applications. Some include support for the full visualization pipeline from data to interactive graphics, while others focus only on a subset, typically graphics and interaction.
D3 - A JavaScript library for data-driven DOM manipulation, interaction and animation. Includes utilities for visualization techniques and SVG generation.
Processing and Processing.js - A popular Java-like graphics and interaction language and IDE. Processing has a strong user community with many examples.
Protovis - JavaScript visualization language, predecessor of d3.
HTML/!JavaScript/XML - use standard web technologies to build the visualization. You may use libraries such as jQuery, Dojo, and the Google Maps API to help build your visualization.
PolyMaps – create map displays with JavaScript & SVG
Flare - Visualization toolkit for Adobe Flash
Modest Maps - Mapping library for Flash
Prefuse - Visualization toolkit for Java
Improvise - Java system supporting coordinated views
InfoVis Toolkit - A Java visualization library, from INRIA France
Piccolo - A Java library for zoomable UIs, from the University of Maryland (Java and .NET)
VTK - A scientific visualization library (C++ with wrappers for other languages)
Statistical Data Analysis Tools
Tableau for Student– get Tableau free license as a student.
Tableau Public - a free version of Tableau which publishes to the web
GGobi - visualizations for multivariate data
Improvise - a visualization tool supporting a variety of visualization types
ParVis - software for parallel coordinates
TimeSearcher - interface for time-series data from U Maryland
TreeMap - tree-mapping software from U Maryland
Network Analysis Tools
Color Tools
kuler - Color Palette Generator
Web Development Tools
Beginner? Start with Sublime Text with Emmet and SublimeLinter/JSHint
Like IDE and willing to pay? Webstorm is a good option.
Dash is great for quick documentation look up in Mac.
Tutorials & Tips
These tutorials could be useful for your future visualization work.
HTML, CSS
Basics:
Extras
Sass is easy to learn and powerful way to write
Compass contains a lot of reusable patterns.
Twitter Bootstrap is a popular template.
Javascript
Fundamental JavaScript Concepts
JavaScript Garden is a good reference to language quirks and gotchas.
Eloquent Javascript – free online book by Marijn Haverbeke
A re-introduction to JavaScript (JS Tutorial) on Mozilla Developer Network
JavaScript: The Good Parts – Douglas Crockford (See also his YUI videos)
Learning JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani
Debugging:
Learn to use the Webkit Inspector (or Firebug if you’re a firefox fan.)
- Learn useful short keys– the basic one is cmd+shift+Ifor opening inspector. Then you can learn more by clicking the gear button on the bottom right and see the shortcuts tab
use JSHint to avoid syntactic bugs
Javascript MVC
Backbone.jsSimple MVC Backbone
Angular.js - better but takes more time to learn (say 1-2 weeks to really understand concepts)
Start with egghead.io and thinkster.io.
Angular’s official document is a pain. When you look at it, make sure to look at comments so you learn from others’ confusion. Hopefully the community is big, so it should get better overtime though.
Use yeoman
Useful stuff from mg-newsletter
Make sure to have AngularJS Batarang in Chrome so you can debug scope.
Javascript Library like Lodash (An arguably better fork of underscore.) – make sure to use them only if you need. Sometimes d3 helpers are enough.
Need an in-memory database for your vis prototype? - try datavore or crossfilter
Syntax alternatives: Coffeescript, MS TypeScript
d3.js
Interactive Data Visualization for the Web Scott Murray(free online version)
- Scott Murray’s Original tutorial (shorter)
Jérôme Cukier & Scott Murray’s d3 tutorial at Strata 2013 (slides)
- (older) d3 tutorial at Visweek 2012 by Jérôme Cukier, Jeff Heer, and Scott Murray. (source, demo, cheatsheet)
More extensive list of examples can be found in d3’s tutorial page and gallery and Christophe Viau’s gallery.
Git & Github
Git Tutorials
Github
Use Github’s issue tracker, so you can refer to issues in your commit messages using # followed by issue no.
Working in a team? Use Github’s Pull Request so you can do code review.
- Pull Request Workflows by Patrick Cozzi
Extras
Need to merge multiple repos (e.g. using datavore in another project)? Use git subtree and DO NOT use git submodule.
GUI
- Using git with command line is generally fast but using SourceTree is easier for reviewing your code before committing or committing a part of your changes and reduce chances that you will run a wrong command (such as push wrong branch to master).
More Tips
Atomic Commit is a good practice.
Stash is useful when you have unfinished messy things and need to switch branches to work on something else.
Links
Visualization Blogs
Other Resources Lists
Tamara Munzner’s Course at UBC
John Stasko’s Course at Georgia Tech