In this workshop, we will help you learn the basics of this powerful software system and get you started on making visualizations of your own data. The complete documentation for DX, up to date as of the last commercial release (circa 1997), with some additions made since the release of OpenDX, is available online and as part of the package you download to install your own copy of OpenDX. This workshop is designed to augment that documentation which is sometimes a bit too austere for newcomers to fully understand (but a great reference for those who use DX regularly).

I will refer you to that documentation for coverage of certain material where the information is still accurate and better presented than I could do. I will annotate and comment on portions that I know are either out-of-date or unusually unclear. I have written a lot of new material based on my hands-on classes with new users. There will appear to be some overlap between these different modalities, but I hope any overlap will provide different perspectives on issues and not seem too repetitious.

I'm trying to put myself in your shoes: it's all new to you, and can be confusing at first. It is possible to achieve a good understanding of DX after you work with it. In my case, I remember a day when I just "got" it. All of a sudden, I wasn't flailing trying to figure out which module to choose next; the scales fell from my eyes and the DX Data Model all of a sudden made sense. After that, it became easy to conceive how to manipulate data objects; how to format data so DX could work with it easily; when it made more sense to use DX to restructure data objects and when it was simply easier to redesign the input format; and so on. I'm going to try to give you some of this insight rather than a set of rote exercises. There are exercises and they are necessary to teach you the physical manipulations required. But the real art of DX is in understanding the structure of the objects you create and manipulate to make the images you wish to see. My approach is to force you to think about (or guess) what is going on, then explain to you the way I think about it. I hope this will get you to think "in DX" as you work with this program in the future.