Short Course: Interactive Visualization Tools for Socio-Environmental Data SESYNC Short Course: August 15–16, 2013

Draft Agenda

Day 1 (August 15) Introduction to Information Visualization – Hands-on with Spotfire, Treemap, NodeXL, etc.

9:00 am Welcome and introductions

9:45 am Introduction to Information Visualization, Dr. Ben Shneiderman  Human-computer interaction basics  Information visualization overview  Data type by task taxonomy

10:45 am Break

11:00 am Hands-on practice with visualization applications, Dr. Catherine Plaisant  Hands-on with online best examples  Introduction to professional analysis software (Spotfire) and hands-on practice  Discussion of benefits and challenges

12:30 pm Lunch

1:30 pm Hands-on practice continued, Dr. Catherine Plaisant  Introduction to Treemap for hierarchical information analysis and hands-on practice

2:30 pm Break

3:00 pm Dr. Catherine Plaisant  Introduction to NodeXL for social network analysis and hands-on practice  Q&A, discussion of benefits and challenges

5:00 pm Departure

Note: participants will work in groups of 2 or 3 and be asked to either install the software on their laptop or to use SESYNC computers made available to them.

Short Course: Interactive Visualization Tools for Socio-Environmental Data SESYNC Short Course: August 15–16, 2013

Draft Agenda

Day 2 (August 16) Introduction and Hands-on Practice on R and GIS Visualization

9:00 am: Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Mr. Anupam Anand  Concepts of GIS: Definition, data and information, spatial and non-spatial data, temporal data  Data Types and Sources: Data types: raster and vector; sources of geospatial data, including national mapping agencies, census data, and web resources  Hands-on: Data visualization and importing – Importing and exporting data, viewing raster and vector data, thematic mapping

10:30 am Break

10:45 am Spatial analysis and mapping, Mr. Anupam Anand  Introduction to spatial analysis, analysis framework, spatial elements, spatial measurements, union, intersection, query, buffering, reclassification  Hands-on: Attribute query and retrieval: running attributes query and spatial query  Overlay analysis: Carrying out vector and raster overlay analysis  Map Composition: Map composition and map generation

12:30 pm Lunch Break

1:30 pm Introduction to R and related GIS Visualization, Mr. Anupam Anand  Advantages of ‘R’ via a vis other options. Hands-on: Visualizing spatial data in R: Making static and dynamic thematic maps using Google and open street map as base layers , Generating KML files  Basic GIS operation in R: Importing, Exporting, Projection, cropping, masking, buffer analysis  Spatial analysis: Overlay analysis using Vector and Raster data

By the end of the session, participants will have sufficient background to differentiate between spatial data types and identify spatial characteristics of diverse application areas, enabling them to integrate spatial thinking and GIS analysis into their academic research and careers. Note: We will use ArcGIS and ‘R’ for basic analysis . We will also discuss open- source software options.

3:00 pm Break

3:30 pm Advanced use of R for visualizing spatial and space time plots, Dr. Michael Mann  Basics of GGPLOT2 for visualizing distributions, and intro to mixing spatial temporal data  Introduction to the use of raster stacks for space time raster modeling  Use of rasterVis for visualizing space time processes

5:30 pm Departure