Course Announcement
CS6364 Hypermedia -- Visualizing the Internet
Spring Quarter
Wednesdays 4:30 to 7:30
The focus of this course is on visualization to facilitate browsing and
querying of the WWW and other hyper-linked information spaces. The
major emphasis is on visual "road maps" which show the relationships
between pages or collections of pages. Such road maps may be literal
or metaphorical: we will use wayfinding and metaphor literature to
provide a grounding in these two concepts. We will identify typical
navigational tasks so that various road maps can be evaluated on the basis
of which task they support particularly well. Other topics include
visualizations to present the result of queries; automatic generation
of road maps; and experimental comparisons of various information space
representations.
The course will be organized around a series of readings from the
literature. We will draw from some psychological, cartographic and
architectural wayfinding literature, and then move on for most of the
course to papers from Communications of the ACM, the ACM
conferences on Hypertext, the CHI (Computer-Human Interaction)
conferences, the UIST (User Interface Software) Symposiums, and
similar meetings.
We will have two guest lectures in the course. One of them will be by
Keith Andrews (http://hyperg.iicm.tu-graz.ac.at/keith), who lead the
Harmony project (the browser for the Hyper-G system) for several years.
He currently leads the VRweb VRML viewer project.
The other guest lecture will be by Jay Bolter
(http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/Bolter.html)
who will discuss his StorySpace hypertext system.
In addition to reading the papers and being actively involved in
class discussions, students will do two projects:
1. Evaluate/critique an existing WWW (or other information space)
visualization tool or approach, commenting on how well the
visualization supports various tasks, how effective its literal or
metaphorical images are, its scalability, and evaluating other
criteria we will develop in class.
2. Build, install, and evaluate a visual road map to an existing set
of WWW pages. The road map could be just a set of Web pages using
image maps, a 3D VRML model, or a 2D or 3D map with active
elements implemented in Java. This project will normally be done in teams,
coupling together students with programming skills and students with design
skills.
The course prerequisite is a user interface design course (such as CS
4753 or CS 6751 or ISYE 6215) or equivalent user interface design
experience. Programming is NOT a prerequisite: we hope for and encourage
a mix of backgrounds. If you are uncertain whether your background is
appropriate for the course, talk with one of the instructors.
The course will be co-taught by Professor Jim Foley (foley@cc) from the
College of Computing and Dr. Andreas Dieberger (andreas.dieberger@lcc),
visiting researcher in LCC. Jim Foley is director of the GVU Center, with
interests in computer graphics and human-computer interaction. He has
recently focused on information visualization.
Dr. Dieberger's interests are in hypertext and human factors for
information systems (user interface issues). In his Ph.D. thesis, he
studied what user interface designers can learn from psychology, city
planning, architecture and related fields to support navigation using
a city metaphor. Current work is with textual virtual environments
(MUDs and MOOs) that can be used as a framework for experimenting
with spatial metaphors, also for the WWW. In September 1994 he
organized a workshop on spatial metaphors for information systems at
the European Conference on Hypertext (ECHT'94) in Edinburgh,
Scotland. Andreas has a home page, with links to his papers and projects,
at http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/andreas_dieberger/Home.html.
--
Jim Foley
GVU Center & College of Computing Phone 404 894 0671
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Fax 404 894 0673
GVU home page - http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/gvutop.html
----- above are new phone numbers in effect as of 12/18/95 ------