Indiana University to Offer Free Information Visualization MOOC, Beginning January 22

Katy Börner, the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science and Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University, and an international leader in information visualization, will offer a free massive open online course on the topic beginning Jan. 22. The course will run seven weeks, with a target audience of graduate students able to work three to six hours per week. Anyone interested in generating temporal, geospatial, topical or network analyses and visualizations from either personal or professional data would benefit from the course. This course provides an overview about the state of the art in information visualization. It teaches the process of producing effective visualizations that take the needs of users into account. Among other topics, the course covers:

• Data analysis algorithms that enable extraction of patterns and trends in data
• Major temporal, geospatial, topical, and network visualization techniques
• Discussions of systems that drive research and development.

The homepage for the Information Visualization MOOC offers an introductory video, a course schedule, biographies of Börner and the other instructors, and a registration link. Everybody who registers gains free access to the Scholarly Database (26 million paper, patent and grant records) and the Sci2 Tool (100-plus algorithms and tools). Börner is curator of the internationally traveled Places & Space: Mapping Science exhibit and author of the Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know, published in 2010 by The MIT Press. She specializes in the study of the structure and evolution of scientific disciplines, the analysis and visualization of online activity, and the development of cyberinfrastructures for large-scale scientific collaboration and computation.