Please follow these instructions for downloading loon before the tutorial. Download again the night before the tutorial in case there have been updates.

Loon is an interactive visualization toolkit for analysts/users/developers engaged in open-ended, creative, and possibly unscripted data exploration. Loon’s base set of plots include scatterplots, histograms, barplots, parallel and radial axes plots, graph structures, and any combination of these.

Designed for interactive exploratory data analysis, loon plots can be horizontally/vertically panned, horizontally/vertically zoomed, and have plot elements linked to one another to effect such coordinated display behaviour as the selection of points, brushing, etc.

Beyond a standard suite, loon scatterplots allow a wide variety of point glyphs including serial axes glyphs, text strings, or any custom designed image. Point glyphs may be interactively changed (e.g. colours, shape, size, image, visibility, even location) and functions written which react to any of these changes (thus permitting new interactive possibilities).

Scatterplots are also layered, where each layer may contain any number of graphic elements (e.g. lines, circles, polygons, text, etc.), and layers may be made invisible or moved up or down the rendering stack. Common uses of layers include maps and display of fitted functions; layered elements are objects which can also be made to react to arbitrary changes in the display. A “loon inspector” provides a central control panel shared by all plots but which adapts to whichever is the active plot.

In this tutorial, participants will become familiar with loon’s functionality through a series of examples and hands-on exercises. These will cover a wide spectrum of applications beginning with data analysis, including high-dimensional exploratory data analysis, methodological exploration for the classroom or research, as well as exploratory prototyping of new interactive visualizations.

To get a full sense of loon’s power, it is highly recommended that participants come with a laptop having installed loon prior to the tutorial.

Instructor

Wayne Oldford is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Waterloo.

Loon is joint work with Adrian Waddell and was developed as a major part of Adrian’s PhD thesis: Interactive Visualization and Exploration of High-Dimensional Data

Tutorial material

These links will be continuously updated up to the day of the tutorial.

The tutorial depends on you bringing your own laptop with software pre-installed.

The tutorial will be using the most recent (development) version of loon which could have changes up to the night before the tutorial. Please make sure you have the most up to date version on the day of the tutorial.