While the unit is used as an elective for all FIT degrees, it is meant to fulfil a service teaching function across the university. Its introduction is intended to be resource neutral for FIT (after an introductory period). This will be achieved by attracting sufficient enrollments from other faculties. The unit is designed to involve staff from across a range of faculties including various Sciences, Business and Economics, Performing Arts and Information Technology in particular. In this way it can be ensured that the unit is relevant across mutiple faculties and degrees, and that it provides relevant and up to date learning experiences for all students.

The unit fills a need across the university for improving the visual literacy of students in the context of information display, analysis and exploration. The visual display of information and an ability to reason about information presented in this manner is an essential component of research, teaching and communication in general. The unit is aimed at providing basic literacy in information graphics and interactive information display to students across all degrees and faculties, including FIT.

The initial offering of this unit was not terribly popular: I have updated the name and the synopsis to better explain why this is is an important and useful unit.

For implementation in Semester 1, 2014.

9/9/2016 - Added a prohibition of FIT3020 (Information Visualisation) and assessment.

12/06/2017: Admin - updating location of offering to reflect actual campus offerings at the ADE's request. 28/4/2021 - Unit disestablished at FEC 2/21 Item 6.2

The unit is of relevance across all disciplines in the university and is targeted to students who have completed at least one semester of study in any discipline.

(The unit also plays a role within the Faculty of IT's degree structures by underpinning, units such as FIT3139 Computational Science and by providing specific background to any unit in visually-oriented computing such as Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Graphics.)

The unit develops skills in analysis and synthesis of visual information displays with two particular foci:

The unit provides students with the opportunity to design and implement their own visual displays of relevance to their home discipline and allows them to engage with domain experts from this discipline (through inter-faculty staff involvement). It equips students with the skills and knowledge to analyse and critically assess the displays of others.

These skills are necessary for any and every student since the production of information graphics facilitates communication in any domain and may be used for example: to enhance an argument presented in prose, to convey spatial data, to clearly present numerical information allowing for comparison, to outline the organisation of an argument, to communicate the flow of information, to represent the structure of a set of relationships (such as interactions between system components in the context of engineering, or perhaps between humans in an organisation), to depict change over some time period, or in a vast range of other applications.

On successful completion of this unit, you should be able to:

029999

Data visualisation is a powerful technique that allows us to use our visual system to understand data. Interactive data visualisation is now common in business, engineering and design and the social and physical sciences. This unit introduces the main kinds of information graphics and interactive visualisation systems and their areas of application. It investigates the reasons why visualisation can be effective and based on this students will gain experience in critically assessing data visualisations and in designing their own visualisations. Students will learn how to create visualisations with representative computer tools and gain experience in creating a data visualisation for an application domain of their choice.

Nil

On-campus

The unit involves inter-faculty staff participation in the form of guest lectures and presentations presented by staff from various university faculties in addition to standard lectures presented by staff from the faculty of Information Technology. In addition to the unit's main coordinator and chief examiner, contributors include (but are not limited to):

Dr. John Betts (Faculty of IT) is an expert in visualising quantitative statistical data and multivariate data visualisation.

Prof. Kim Marriott (Faculty of IT) is an international expert in information visualization and diagrammatic reasoning. He has over 160 publications was awarded a ARC Professorial Fellowship in 2004 and has received well over four million dollars in external grants. He was one of the co-founders of an international interdisciplinary conference on the use of diagrams.

Dr. Michael Wybrow (Faculty of IT) is an early career researcher focusing on the design and usability of software tools for authoring and viewing network diagrams, a popular type of information graphic. In 2008 he won the CORE award for best Australasian Computer Science thesis.

Dr. Wojtek Goscinski (Monash e-Research Centre) is the coordinator of the Multimodal Australian Science Imaging and Visualisation Environment (MASSIVE), a specialist Australian computing facility for imaging and visualization. Since early 2009 he has been the Advanced Technology Analyst at the Monash e-Research Centre, a role in which he promotes effective and creative applications of technology in research. He is a Research Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) in the School or Architecture and Design at RMIT.

Dr. Daniel Price (School of Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science) is a Monash Research Fellow in Astrophysics. Previously he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Astrophysics group of the School of Physics at the University of Exeter. He completed his PhD at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Daniel's research interests are in Computational Astrophysics using computer visualisation techniques.

Peter McIlwain (School of Music Conservatorium, Faculty of Arts) is a composer specialising in computer and electro-acoustic music who has a wide range of musical and artistic interests. These include writing works for traditional ensembles, film and music theatre as well as computer music and installation art. Recent projects have included the development of Nodal software at the Centre for Electronic Media Art. He is Lecturer in Composition and Music Technology and heads up the Sonic Art Group at Monash University. He is currently President of the Australasian Computer Music Association or ACMA.

Examination (2 hours): 40%; In-semester assessment: 60%

Minimum total expected workload equals 12 hours per week comprising:

(a.) Contact hours for on-campus students:

(b.) Additional requirements (all students):

FIT

Guest lectures by academics in other faculties on the use of visual information in their own disciplines (Including staff from Science, Business and Economics and Arts).

24 points of first year studies.