CS6364 Hypermedia -- Course Calendar

Course Times: Wed, 4:30 PM - 7:30 PM

For each date we will give a short outline of the topics planned for that unit and what papers you are expected to have read by then the latest.

March 27th

Introductory lecture. We will give an overview of the course and give an introduction into major issues of information visualization to support navigation in information spaces. We will also give an introduction into metaphors and issues of cogitive mapping.
Reading: Lynch, Nielsen (The Art of navigation), browse our Webpointers as much as possible

April 3rd

In this session we will cover the working of metaphors in more detail. We will also give an overview of how navigation works in real environments and what (for example) city planners think about how an easy to navigate environment looks like. We will then describe how these issues correlate with user interface metaphors. We will then look at Jakob Nielsens list of features provided / missing in current web browsers and try to create a connection between the real world navigation principles and virtual world navigation (navigation in information spaces).
Reading: Carroll, Montello, Nielsen (Web pages), Tversky, Suggested: Alexander

April 10th

No lecture on this Wednesday. The assignment for this week is to attend the two guest lectures given by Keith Andrews.

April 11th

Keith Andrews Brownbag talk - 12:00 - a more general discussion of HyperG and the Harmony browser for HyperG.
Reading: Andrews (HyperG paper)

April 12th

Keith Andrews guest lecture - 10:00 or 12:00 - in this talk (which is for this course only) Keith will cover HyperG and Harmony in much more detail. Our goal is to make the transition from a frontal lecture into an open discussion on design issues of future distributed information systems. Use the information from the first two lectures to identify features that might make navigation and formation of cognitive maps of knowledge spaces easier.

First assignment due.

April 17th

Guest Lectures by Jay D. Bolter (Storyspace) and Eric Ayers (Graphic History Browser)
Reading: Ayers, Suggested: Bernstein (Architectures for volatile hypertext)

This week we will also form teams of 3 for the second assignment.

April 24th

This week I would like to make a discussion session (at least for some of the session). My idea is that you all can send me URLs of pages that you would like to get discussed in the course and if appropriate I will make slides of them (or maybe I even find a way to get a live hookup). This may be sites you write your first assignment about or other interesting visualizations you found on the net.

Based on these examples I would like to go through the issues of wayfinding, metaphors, cognitive map formation and scale with a little more detail. We will also look at where metaphors are broken and how this affects navigation.

Please read the following papers for this week: Card (knowledge characteristic function), Marshall (Spatial Hypertext), and if you have the time: Poblete (no free ride) and Wise (visualizing the non-visual).

Remember what Keith stressed in his talks several times: We need structures in our systems that go beyond the simple node-link structure. The WWW does not provide such structures by itself but in our designs and visualizations we can make users believe there are such structures. This essentially is what we try to visualize...

May 1st

Example and Video session. Open discussions, deepening of material covered so far.

May 8th - exchanged with May 15th

Focus on graphical visualization of structures and graphical navigation tools.
Reading: Hendley, Spoerri

May 15th - exchanged with May 8th

Use of visualizations to create simple and complex queries, to understand document relevance and to understand information spaces.
Reading: Veerasamy, Poblete, Wise

May 22nd

(no lecture)

May 29th

Double feature: Student presentations of second assignment. We will meet twice this week: once at the normal course time and a second time (time and date yet to be announced) for the remaining group presentations.

June 5th

(exam week): Term paper due.

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last modified on 5/6/96