Data Visualization Design

June 23-27, 2025 · Jonas Schöley · jschoeley.com

Course description

"Visualizing Data" is an intensive five day workshop where participants practice the trade of data visualization. Visualization will be taught as a design process: In order to design effective visualization one needs to have a clear communication purpose in mind, know the audience, know a wide range of visualization idioms, be fluent in the tools required to transform imagination into a finished product, and be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the visualization. This broad range of skills requires the integration of theory and practice. Participants will learn about visualization theory, including human perception, marks and channels, the visualization design process, and best practices. They will create their own visualizations given a question and a dataset, recreate, criticize and improve upon existing visualizations, and -- supported by the group and the lecturer -- work on their own visualization project.

Upon completion of the course the participants will:

• understand visualization as a design process (as opposed to a set of techniques)
• formulate a question and design an effective visualization to answer it

Participants learn the technical skills to:

• use R in conjunction with ggplot2, dplyr and tidyr to create a wide range of static visualizations
• produce multi-layered maps and perform basic geocomputation using the sf package
• be able to produce interactive visualizations with R and shiny

Course Outline

• 5 day workshop combining lectures and practicals
• 3.5 hours per day
• June 23-27, 2025 @ MPIDR

Time	Activity
09:30--09:45	(Monday only) Orientation meeting
10:00--12:00	lecture
12:00--13:00	lunch break
13:00--14:30	lecture + practical
Afternoon	work on project proposal

• Day 1: Visualization design
• Day 2: Visual perception
• Day 3: Visualizing spatial data
• Day 4: Visualizing spatial data, ctnd.
• Day 5: Interaction and animation & Project presentation

Course prerequisites

In their application for the course participants need to propose a visualization project which can be finished over the course of the week. I suggest to produce an explanatory graphic for a particular data set and topic.

Participants need to bring a laptop with the latest available versions of R, and Inkscape installed on it.

Participants will profit from basic experience in using R (loading data, installing and loading packages, indexing vectors, data.frames and matrices).

Examination

Participants pass the course if they finish the visualization project outlined in their proposal.

Course ressources

• Day 1: Visualization design
  • Slides Visualization design
  • Excercise Direct annotation
  • Excercise Cumulative plot reveal
  • Example England & Wales mortality sex ratios
  • Further reading Munzner (2024). Visualization Analysis & Design
• Day 2: Visual perception
  • Slides Visual perception
  • Example Lexis surface plots and the effective use of color
  • Further reading Ware (2023). Information Visualization. Perception for Design
• Day 3: Visualizing spatial data
  • Slides Visualizing spatial data
  • Excercise Basemap
  • Example DHS borders
  • Example Raster data
  • Example Nonspatial raster data
  • Example Basemap
  • Further reading Introduction to the terra package
• Day 4: Visualizing spatial data, ctnd.
  • Example French TFR
  • Example Bivariate Fertility
  • Example Tricolore
  • Example Global lifetables
  • Example Mapping uncertainty
  • Example Bubble grid
  • Further reading Simple Features for R
• Day 5: Dynamic vizualizations
  • Animation
    • Example German ICU occupation
    • Example e0 animation
  • Interactivity
    • Example Likelihood guessr
    • Example HMD explorer
    • Example Interactive TFR