Please note that this seminar will now take place in Jack Cole 1.33A on Wednesday 5th July between 15:00 and 16:00

Title: Between Exploration and Explanation: Visualizations for Insights, Curiosity, and Storytelling.

Abstract: This talk presents a set of interactive visualizations for exploration and recent work in how to communicate insights through data-driven stories. In particular, I will present work on visualizing networks including an open-source online platform. Then, I will discuss comics as an approach to communicate not only changes in temporal data but to weave narration, textual explanations, and data visualizations. The questions raised by the talk are about effective ways to engage a larger audience in understanding, learning, and use of visualizations for exploration and communication. As visualizations are becoming more and more commonplace and familiar to people, we can see more and more aspects of our daily lives being potentially enriched with information presented visually. Eventually, I want to raise the question of which role novel technology such as Augmented and Virtual Reality can play in exploring, communicating, and interacting with visualizations.

Biography: Benjamin is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualizations to help people explore, present, and understand information hidden in data. He focuses on the visualization of dynamic networks (e.g., social networks, brain connectivity networks), as well as temporal data (e.g., changes in videos and Wikipedia articles, events on timelines), comics for storytelling with visualizations, as well as visualization and interaction in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2017, Benjamin worked as a postdoc at Harvard University, Monash University, as well as the Microsoft-Research Inria Joint Centre. Benjamin was visiting researcher at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Université Paris Sud where he worked at the Aviz Group at Inria.

Title:  Finding What to Read: Visual Text Analytics Tools and Techniques to Guide Investigation

Abstract:  Text is one of the most prominent forms of open data available, from social media to legal cases. Text visualizations are often critiqued for not being useful, for being unstructured and presenting data out of context (think: word clouds). I argue that we should not expect them to be a replacement for reading. In this talk I will briefly discuss the close/distant reading debate then focus on where I think text visualization can be useful: hypothesis generation and guiding investigation. Text visualization can help someone form questions about a large text collection, then drill down to investigate through targeted reading of the underlying source texts. Over the past 10 years my research focus has been primarily on creating techniques and systems for text analytics using visualization, across domains as diverse as legal studies, poetics, social media, and automotive safety.  I will review several of my past projects with particular attention to the capabilities and limitations of the technologies and tools we used, how we use semantics to structure visualizations, and the importance of providing interactive links to the source materials. In addition, I will discuss the design challenges which, while common across visualization, are particularly important with text (legibility, label fitting, finding appropriate levels of ‘zoom’).

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The ACM SIGCHI conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17) is in full swing in Edinburgh, with a strong presence of SACHI research, especially in the area of Data Physicalization! Check out our related pictorial, full paper, workshop and workshop paper:

Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs and Eva Hornecker. The Visual and Beyond: Characterizing Experiences with Auditory, Haptic and Visual Data Representations. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), pp. 797-809, 2017.

Samuel Huron, Pauline Gourlet, Uta Hinrichs, Trevor Hogan and Yvonne Jansen. Let’s Get Physical: Promoting Data Physicalization in Workshop Formats. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), pp. 1409-1422, 2017.

Fearn Bishop and Uta Hinrichs. Challenges of Running Constructive Visualization Studies with Children. In DIS’17 workshop on Pedagogy & Physicalization: Designing Learning Activities around Physical Data Representations.

Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs, Yvonne Jansen, Samuel Huron, Pauline Gourlet, Eva Hornecker and Bettina Nissen. Pedagogy & Physicalization: Designing Learning Activities around Physical Data Representations. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), 2017. http://dataphys.org/workshops/dis17/.