本课程适对数据进行可视化挖掘和理解大的各专业大学生和各学科实践者。数据可视化是一项致力于把抽象的数据或概念转化为适于人类理解和接受的视觉化的信息技术，是一个典型的交叉学科。其目的是利用有图形清晰有效地传递信息。
它不只是追求理论知识和抽象概念，而是将理论与实践无缝连接起来，通过一系列精心设计的案例研究，让学生学习数据可视化的有用技术。它系统地介绍了可视化的基本知识，以及可视化的历史和现状。通过本课程的学习，学生将领略到数据可视化的魅力和力量，并获得丰富的实践经验。

This course is suitable for university students of all majors and practitioners in various disciplines who are interested in visually exploring and understanding the data of interest. Data visualization is an interdisciplinary field about the visual representation of data and information, aiming to communicate messages clearly and effectively using principled graphical means. Instead of solely pursuing theoretical knowledge and abstract concepts, it seamlessly connects theory with practice to enable students to learn useful techniques about data visualization through a series of well-designed case studies. It systematically covers the fundamental knowledge of visualization as well as the history and the state of the art of visualization. By completing this course, students will appreciate both the beauty and power of data visualization and have rich hands-on experiences on implementing popular visualization techniques.