Data-Driven Information Visualization

About this course

Visual information displays have epic significance for communicating knowledge. The world is complex, diverse, and always changing, but our screens are mostly flat and paper prints are static. When we succeed at displaying the complexity of the world in an interactive and multidimensional chart, graph or map so that readers can unpack it in their brains, we call it ‘escaping flatland.’ The best examples that achieve this are crafted with code. This course offers a deep dive into technologies and methodologies involved in the production of modern information visualizations. You will work in groups to build a complete information visualization system from data acquisition and processing to visual representation and user interactivity.

Pre-requisites

One year of computer science at university level. One of the computer science courses should be in algorithms and data structures. Knowledge of at least one object-oriented programming language (e.g. Java, Python).

Faculty

Angie Hjort

Founder of Encharted Media AB, a consulting company maintaining Gapminder Foundation’s visualization software, Vizabi (2024–present). Previously Head of Software and Visualisation Developer at Gapminder Foundation, responsible for software efforts of gapminder.org/tools and for developing interactive data pictures (2015–2025). M.Sc. in Human-Computer Interaction with minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Aalto University (2014). M.Eng. in Industrial Automation and Control Systems, Ural Federal University (2011). Previous experience building data-intense visualizations for oil platform safety monitoring, user interfaces for an online payment aggregator, and control systems and operator user interfaces for an ore processing factory. With DIS since 2022.