Social Visualization
MIT's Media Arts and Sciences course looks at how to make the growing crowd of people online visible, tracking their activities and interactions through visual design. Readings draw from sociology, psychology, and interface design to build a cognitive and cultural foundation for representing virtual crowds. Students work through a series of design exercises that experiment with mapping electronic spaces and depicting group behavior online, moving from theory into applied visualization projects. The course materials are published through MIT OpenCourseWare and are free to access, covering the syllabus, readings list, and assignment descriptions used in the original class. It suits students interested in data visualization, human-computer interaction, or the sociology of online spaces, and treats visualization as a design problem grounded in how people actually understand crowds and social structure.