Psychology 6135

Psychology of Data Visualization

This is the GitHub repo for my graduate course, Psychology 6135: Psychology of Data Visualization taught in the Psychology Quantitative Methods program at York University. The online website is hosted at https://friendly.github.io/6135/.

Course Description

Information visualization is the pictorial representation of data.

• Successful visualizations capitalize on our capacity to recognize and understand patterns presented in information displays.
• Conversely, they require that writers of scientific papers, software designers and other providers of visual displays understand what works and what does not work to convey their message.

This course will examine a variety of issues related to data visualization from a largely psychological perspective, but will also touch upon other related communities of research and practice related to this topic:

• history of data visualization,
• computer science and statistical software,
• visual design,
• human factors,
• data journalism.

We will consider visualization methods for a wide range of types of data from the points of view of both the viewer and designer/producer of graphic displays.