BMI 5/625, Spring 2025

Principles & Practice of Data Visualization

Overview

This course will give students a foundation in the principles of data visualization, particularly as applied to scientific and technical data, as well as provide students with hands-on experience using modern software tools for developing visualizations. Lecture topics will include an overview of visual perception, color theory and practice, different types of graphs and their purposes, visualizations for specialized forms of data including time-series and geospatial data sets, strategies for working with multidimensional data, etc. There will also be lecture content on ethical issues surrounding data visualization. Weekly lab sessions will introduce students to popular data visualization tools such as R’s ggplot and Shiny, etc.

Textbooks & Resources

• Course Page on OHSU Sakai

• Labs & In-Class Readings

• Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction
  • While a paper copy is helpful, the author has posted a draft manuscript of the book online
  • If you are able to purchase a paper copy, please consider doing so from one of our excellent local independent bookstores.
• Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization
  • Annie Bloom’s
  • Powell’s
• Other useful books can be found on the Resources section.

Course goals

By the end of the course, students will be:

• Work independently with data, including wrangling, tidying, visualizing, and basic analyses.
• Understand the strengths, weaknesses, assumptions and limitations to different visualization types.
• Know about a variety of types/scope of visualizations one can use.
• Become proficient with the tools and vocabulary needed to create visualizations in R.
• Develop the ability to create comprehensive data visualization reports; tailored to a specific audience, clear to understand, and hitting the hallmarks of excellent visualization as laid out in our report rubric.

Basic course structure

Mondays: Lecture

Wednesdays: Lab

Logistics

When & Where?

When

Monday & Wednesday, 15:30-17:00

Starts: March 31

Ends: June 11 (last class session; term officially ends the following week)

Where

CHH2 12110 (and hybrid via Webex)

Online? In-Person? Both/And!

This term, the class will be hybrid, meaning that both online and in-person attendance permitted. If you can join us in-person, that’s great; if not, the room we will be meeting in is well-equipped for streaming and we have used it very successfully in the past for hybrid education. Lectures and lab sessions will be recorded and made available online shortly after the class period.

Notably, due to the instructor having said “yes” to too many things over the last year, all of which somehow ended up being scheduled for April and May, there will be several class sessions that will take place online only as I will be out of town. We will meet at the normal times on those days, it’ll just be virtually. Details of the schedule are available here.

Who?

Instructor: Steven Bedrick

Office Location: Gaines Hall, 21

Office Hours: by appointment