Info+ is a long-standing data vis conference, held biannually in rotating locations. This year, it was hosted at Northeastern University in Boston (my alma mater), chaired by Pedro Cruz of Northeastern and Sarah Williams from MIT. The event was an action-packed three days of workshops, keynotes, seminars and social activities, and even included an art exhibition at the MIT media lab.

The conference was a dose of concentrated inspiration, with a head-spinning line up of back-to-back 10-minute seminars by leading designers in the visualization field. By the second day there were definitely some unifying themes emerging from the blur of inspiration and ideas. 

You can find recordings and abstracts for all of the talks on the conference homepage. A few selected presentations are also linked below.

From communication-to towards communication-with

As someone who’s been in the data vis community for a long time, the biggest change I noticed was a shift in the general framing of data vis problems. Instead of Tufte-esque critiques of “proper” visualization techniques or discussion of misinformation and misleading graphics in politics, the conversation (at least in this conference) has shifted strongly toward more participatory practices in data vis.

Rather than talking about how to present data so that people will understand it, the focus was on how to have conversations—with people, using data—and how to include appropriate context and resolution to help them see how it fits into and reflects their lives. This was reflected in games talking about inflation at the grocery store and local biodiversity challenges in college classrooms, mapping inclusive and discriminatory spaces for marginalized communities to inform urban planning, and using info vis techniques to map informal transportation networks in developing nations.

When communicating with disenfranchised groups (like middle-schoolers impacted by extreme climate events and migrants hesitant about motivations behind the intervention), it can also be a challenge to overcome obstacles to communication, like self-censorship and diminished agency.

Visualizing marginalized perspectives

Across many talks, there was a focus on using data as a form of community expression, and using locally-generated data to capture experiences that are often left out of the dominant narrative. The conference exhibition included a project to record the important annual events for the Quecha people of the Amazon, organizing their year around important agricultural and cultural events.

Another team used conversations with migrants to improve shelters, focusing on designing features that will support them best in their transition. Data can also help to articulate deep-rooted structural inequalities, or something as “simple” as pronouncing someone’s name. It may also help us to question what we memorialize, how, and why. 

Designing for impact

Some talks showed how to use data in a political context, as a tool for advocacy and creating change. One project focused on providing legal evidence to demonstrate systematic displacement in the West Bank, another created an archive of communities erased by urban redevelopment in Seoul.

A blanket woven from currencies served as an entry point into deeper discussions about economic impacts and the many reasons for migration, informing and humanizing policy decisions at the UN. One team collaborated with corporate sustainability offices to use biodiversity data to create better-informed sustainability policy and achieve more meaningful targets. Data can also help to illustrate what is lost when policies change, such as local shore changes for communities in the Mediterranean, and the pain caused by lost reproductive rights.

Advocacy is one form of impact; others take a more neutral approach. Some speakers discussed using data journalism to represent geopolitical conflicts in an unbiased but informative way. Others illustrated the importance of thoughtful visualizations focused on place and the need to keep things simple when dealing with the practical realities of fast-paced projects in a newsroom. Conversely, including details in your charts can sometimes make them better, more interesting, and more understandable.

New modes for visualizing data

Of course, the medium we choose also influences what we observe. The representation of time in social media platforms can shape and even distort our perceptions. Using different modes of visualization (including touch and sound) can help people engage with and better understand different habitats on the ocean floor.

Textiles have deep traditional roots and can evoke a softer expression of meaning, especially in a cultural context. Acoustic data can have profound emotional impact as well as quantitative meaning, and mixing auditory and visual explorations can encourage different modes of exploration, as well as creating more accessible tools. 

Perhaps my favorite application of unexpected media was using folded paper as the basis for the conference identity, creating rich and nuanced visuals by simple physical means.

Seeing the big picture

Stepping back from day-to-day practices, we also considered how visualization can be a reflection of worldview. Framing is a critical step for a designer grappling to create a visualization, and our underlying theories of change influence both how we approach and how we talk about data visualization.

What I didn’t hear

Across the entire conference, there was almost no mention of AI. Presenters were definitely using AI technologies for certain kinds of data, but their talks were focused on the output rather than the tools. The one talk focused explicitly on AI considered whether it is helpful to use visualization as an input for AI learning, and what properties of a visualization might make it more interpretable and more useful for training an AI. I’m not sure if that was incidental or intentional, but it was a notable absence when so much of our current discourse is dominated by AI froth.

Reflections to take forward

Coming out of these many conversations, I found myself wondering which of the “theory of change” approaches are most effective, for which audiences, and when. Some speakers mentioned negative receptions: from the CDC when talking about data rhetoric and emotional visualizations, and from institutions of higher education when talking about faculty pay inequity. Many others discussed the tangible impacts of their work in shifting stubborn social and policy problems.

As always, the key lies in consciously framing your data and your analysis: in terms of the context, your purpose, the audience, and the people impacted and involved. Across many projects, we heard designers talk about how to define and redefine the problem as a critical step in getting to insight and achieving a successful design. 

As a designer working in industry to create large platform software, I find that all design often gets simplified to UX. It was nice to step outside of that bubble for a moment and remember the many things that design does, and the different places that designers contribute. I do think there is an interesting conversation to be had between the perspective of creating large-scale tools to structure data exploration for decision making at scale, and the one focused on using bespoke and personalized data visualization for communication—either to or with—an audience once the analysis is complete. 

Many of the unique, nuanced and contextual factors in a dataset can get blurred out when analyzing data at scale, and much of the big picture gets lost when focusing only on the particularities of a specific dataset. And yet, both the large and the contextualized cases come down to helping humans create big-picture conclusions by understanding nuances in the data. Building systems to accommodate large, unwieldy, and heterogeneous datasets to connect across these different scales requires insights from both sides. Perhaps that’s a topic for the next conference.

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ren·​dez·​vous [noun] — a meeting at an agreed time and place.

Last year, the S-H-O-W Conference by Graphic Hunters was meant to be the last event Goof van de Winkel organized. However, he came back to set up another well anticipated conference by the community, CEST-LA-VIZ, held in Utrecht on Friday, November 15, 2024. Walking into the Anatomiegebouw building, attendees had to write one word to complete the sentence “Data is…”. Some would have more common sayings like, “Data is everywhere”, “Data is messy”, “Data is power”, where others might have more unique answers including, “Data is cooked”, “Data is queen”, “Data is ATAD backwards”, “Data is reflective”, “Data is overthinking”, and many more.

The day before the conference, I asked Goof about the theme. He replied saying, “the topic is a bit hidden this time. The idea is to focus on some topics in data visualization that are important but perhaps not on top of everyone’s mind in the day-to-day practice. We don’t cover all the important topics because there are simply too many. We focus on a few of them.”

Attendees were served with eight captivating talks from experts, each with their own unique story. Beyond the inspirational yet interactive presentations, we also had data-themed games during the breaks—which made the experience all the more rich and immersive.

CEST-LA-VIZ WITH THE CRÈME DE LA CRÈME

crème·​de·la·​crème [noun] — the best of the best

Pei Ying’s decolonial methodology

The event was opened by Pei Ying Loh with a talk about A Decolonial Approach to Data Storytelling. Together with Kontinentalist, Pei Ying is aiming to bring Asia to the forefront of global conversations by telling stories through visualizations. However, there are challenges in doing so, such as lack of data literacy, lack of familiarity with data visualization, lack of freedom of information legislation (data accessibility), how diversity makes a one-size-fits-all solution difficult, and how there are power imbalances in data and information. She highlights that data visualization as a practice, has a Eurocentric nature—rooted in colonialism.

Martina’s steps to designing a fun workshop

This was followed by Martina Zunica, with the topic The Fun Factor: Boosting Creativity in Workshops. Martina mentioned the aspects considered in designing a workshop, including who the audience are, what the main goal of the workshop is, the tools, what activities or methods can be done, and finally, the fun factor. She has led workshops for different people, including people who are not involved in data, UX/UI designers, data viz enthusiasts, design students, and business analysts. With different approaches tailored to them, such as adding creativity step by step, working in groups or pairs, involving something personal from the participants are what made the workshops fun and engaging.

Stig’s “data is fuel” metaphor

After lunch, Stig Møller Hansen brought a talk on how Data is Fuel. Here, Stig demonstrated how data can be creatively utilized for fueling the creation of captivating visual communication. Stig mentions that you could view design as a subset of data, that part of data is designing how it is presented. But in Stig’s world, he considers data to be a subset of design instead.

Chesca’s immersive data experience elements

Then, Chesca Kirkland, follows with her talk on Immersive Data Experiences. Chesca starts with explaining the components of an immersive data experience. Chesca elaborates on this by showcasing an installation called “The Blue Paradox” which was made to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the ocean. She worked with various mediums to visualize such complex information, and every room in the installation is made immersive, each with different formats.

Till’s types of visualizations in transforming urban spaces

The next speaker, Till Nagel, talked about Transforming Urban Spaces through Embedded Data Visualizations. He titled his presentation “Beneath the Pavement, the Future”. The main thing Till intends to communicate is how to think about new ways to represent our current environment, uncover new possibilities hidden beneath the urban surface or landscape. Till showcased some projects to elaborate on what he means, and this has been summarized into three types of visualizations in this context.

Derya’s feminist data visualizations

Derya Akbaba followed this with the topic, Are Visualizations Haunted? She opened by saying that she designs visualizations that draw on feminist relations. However, when the f-word (feminist) is said, people around her seem to be “afraid” or “annoyed”. Therefore, Derya draws on hauntings as a way to ask deeper questions. She quoted Avery Gordon on hauntings: “Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over or when their oppressive nature is denied.” She starts with the notion that data are haunted. Data are haunted by decisions, power, and in some cases, business profit maximization. Some people have the power to collect data. The power to make, is also the power to obscure or hide it. They are constructed artifacts that embody decision-making practices that can reflect power hierarchies. Therefore, data are sites of haunting. Further, she elaborates that visualizations are also haunted. They are haunted by rhetoric and history, including spatial positioning, colors, labels, and visualization conventions in current practices. Visualizations are reflections of design decisions, embedded with a history of objectivity aesthetics, which in reality are subjective. They, like data, are also sites of haunting. To overcome this, Derya proposes the idea of feminist data visualizations

Adina’s take on a good visual news story

In the last session of speakers, Adina Renner, presented her talk on How Can We Engage People through Visual News Stories? She brought the audience through what a typical day as a visual journalist would look like.  There are different formats of visual stories which include visual breaking news to help readers grasp the news, visual investigations to help readers understand complex connections, and immersive stories to help readers engage with difficult and complex topics. Adina explained what makes a good visual news story.

With visual investigations, we can offer more transparency and accuracy. With immersive stories, we can transport people to different spaces and time. In the end, the most crucial question to ask is, “did we manage to engage, inform, educate, and inspire our readers? 

Erik’s insights on mapping fiction

Erik Escoffier closed the speaker session by presenting about The Art, Tech, and Ethics of Mapping Fiction. Erik discussed a project he worked on, which was to build a fantasy world of books—a gigantic map of literature. They built a map of supposedly all the authors that exist. The proximity is based on Google search proximity. The cities on the maps are the individual books, and the islands are the authors. The size of the islands relates to how famous the author is. Erik talked about how the map was built and what were the lessons learned. After going through different types of maps and brainstorming on what would be the proper way to visualize this, they ended up with a solution which was semi-generative mapping. They used real-world geometries, working with re-projections, transposing geometries, and all that had to work for a large dataset. The resulting map received an abundance of positive feedback from viewers. Yet, some comments made them reflect on their work. It may have perpetuated biases about literature. It revealed gender bias, where not enough female authors were shown as well as Anglocentric bias where most of the books were in English. Erik highlighted an important thing, which was the problem of hyper-specialization.[…] When designers are focused on a very narrow view of a problem, they lose the ability to see the big picture. […] It is a type of tunnel vision that dismisses impact and as a result, alleviates them from their social and ecological responsibility.”

C’EST LA VIE, CEST-LA-VIZ

c’est·la·vie [exclamation] — that’s life

It was such a great pleasure to be able to attend CEST-LA-VIZ. As I participated throughout the day, and heard what the speakers had to say, I looked for a common thread. Pei Ying challenged the Eurocentric nature of data visualization as a practice through proposing a decolonial approach. Martina explored ways to add a fun factor to workshops. Stig opposed the statement that data is facts, with the statement that data is instead, fuel. Chesca challenged the limits of data visualization through immersive data experiences. Till discussed new ways to make visualizations more accessible and engaging for broad audiences. Derya encouraged us to ask questions and to start applying the feminist data visualizations approach. Adina did the same in the process of writing a good visual news story that could engage, inform, and educate readers. And Erik, through reflection, reminded us how something simple and overlooked can perpetuate long-existing biases.

The common thread is no farther than what was written by the organizers. They wrote, “CEST-LA-VIZ is not about accepting the state we are in. It is about asking questions, discussing boundaries, and exploring new ways”. Might I add that the French expression—that the name of the event was supposed to sound like—c’est la vie, is used to express acceptance in the face of a certain (unpleasant or difficult) situation. The conference highlights that we should, to some extent, challenge this. Instead of merely accepting, we should start to ask questions, go beyond boundaries, and explore new ways.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to Chesca Kirkland for providing the remarkable photographs featured in this article and to Sophie Sparkes for the captivating illustration that beautifully complements the content. Finally, a heartfelt thank-you goes to Goof van de Winkel for organizing the conference and for graciously inviting the Data Science and Society Students from the University of Groningen to attend and participate in the CEST-LA-VIZ conference.

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Sunday

Sunday was the first of two days of “co-located workshops and events:” basically eight parallel tracks of half-day or full-day events. I attended the Visualization for Data Science (VDS) workshop (videos: session 1, session 2) in the morning and really enjoyed the closing keynote by Remco Chang. In the session, he described an interesting idea for a Grammar of Hypotheses which might in the future be used to describe what types of  questions can be answered by a given data set or visualization or asked by an analyst, in the hopes of matching them up.

I sat in on the workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (Vis4DH) (videos: 1, 2, 3, 4) in the afternoon and liked the keynote by Miriam Posner about the differences in approach to “data” between humanists and scientists. I won’t paraphrase it badly here, but some key differences include the idea that replication is not a goal in the humanities as it is in the sciences, and that humanists often seek to question/challenge existing categorizations rather than use/reuse them. “Uncertainty” is often about the idea of the category or its appropriateness, rather than numerical uncertainty about a particular value.

Monday

The keynote for the workshop on evaluation and BEyond – methodoLogIcal approaches for Visualization (BELIV) (if you can “believe” that acronym!) by Casey Fiesler (video) really made me think about the ethics of using data in academic or other work in a deeper way than before (and I like to think I’ve read and thought about this a lot already). She highlights that ethics is not just what your ethics committee checks for or what is legal or what is in the terms of use, and encourages people to think like science fiction writers (think: Black Mirror) and imagine the possible terrible ethical consequences of their research.

The closing panel of the VisInPractice workshop (videos: 1, 2, 3, 4) was on Integrating Research and Products, and I appreciated the comments of Richard Brath from Uncharted about how visualizations that really work for domain experts (rather than novices) often seem to contravene strongly held beliefs researchers have about “the right way” to do visualization, like using charts with 2 (or more! gasp!) y-axes.

Tuesday

The opening day for the conference proper was highlighted by the awards ceremonies (video), including best papers, papers that had stood the test of time, career awards, and others. Richard Brath wrote a nice piece about the opening keynote and its relationship to the closing one: both had lots to say about how text integrates with graphics (video: opening keynote by Marti Hearst).

The paper that stood out to me the most was “Affective Learning Objectives for Communicative Visualizations” (preview video), which frames some aspects of vis that are less-often researched in a really nice way.

Wednesday

This was the first of two days with four paper sessions each. The first session was the one that most specifically overlapped with my interests: Transforming Tabular Data and Grammars (video). There were some super-charged pivot tables presented, such as HiTailor (preview video), but the “Animated Vega-Lite” (preview video) and “No Grammar to Rule Them All” (preview video) papers were what really got me fired up. I loved the expert-interview evaluation of “Animated Vega-Lite” and how they were able to add really composable/low-viscosity animation abstractions into Vega-Lite. “No Grammar to Rule Them All” made so many good points and framed things so nicely I was nodding along the whole time I was reading it. I really liked the framing of colloquial versus formal models, for example. 

During the Understanding and Modeling How People Respond to Visualizations session (video), a handy Survey of Perception-Based Visualization Studies by Task was presented, which I’ll likely be referring back to as a resource.

The Short Papers session on “Visualization Systems and Graph Visualization” (video) included a paper on VegaFusion which I co-authored, but I also enjoyed hearing about the NL4Vis (Natural Language for Visualization) improvements in the “Facilitating Conversational Interaction in Natural Language Interfaces for Visualization” paper. I also of course really enjoyed seeing the Plotly-Resampler being presented at VIS.

The final session of the day before the amazing banquet at the First Americans Museum was about Uncertainty (video). The paper that stuck with me from that session (and really the whole conference) was the striking “Dispersion vs Disparity: Hiding Variability Can Encourage Stereotyping When Visualizing Social Outcomes” (preview video), which shines a light on a visualization pitfall I hadn’t thought of before but now can’t unsee.

Thursday

During the Interactive Dimensionality (High Dimensional Data) session (video), I was a little puzzled by some of the papers on “steering” embeddings, but “VERTIGo: A Visual Platform for Querying and Exploring Large Multilayer Networks” (preview video) seemed like a solid UI for querying multilayer graphs.

At the Graphs and Networks session (video), I really liked the presentation on Taurus: Towards A Unified Force Representation and Universal Solver for Graph Layout (preview video), which seemed to really neatly unify a bunch of algorithms into one equation, propose a new algorithm based on that equation, and then propose a single efficient way to solve it. Visualizing Graph Neural Networks with CorGIE: Corresponding a Graph to Its Embedding (preview video) also looks like a clever way of understanding Graph Neural Networks, and I loved the idea of mapping a CIELAB a/b slice to the x/y coordinates of an embedding so as to provide a consistent node color across views!

During the Reflecting on the Field session (video), the paper “Visualization Design Practices in a Crisis: Behind the Scenes with COVID-19 Dashboard Creators” (preview video) talked about COVID dashboards as “boundary objects”— which were the site of negotiations between many parties during a crisis and reminded me of the video I made by stringing together 470 static official Quebec dashboards. This paper made me wonder about the design decisions that drove them.

The final session I attended on Thursday was on Provenance and Guidance (video), and I thought that the “Medley: Intent-based Recommendations to Support Dashboard Composition” (preview video) and “GEViTRec: Data Reconnaissance Through Recommendation Using a Domain-Specific Visualization Prevalence Design Space” (preview video) papers were nice, complementary approaches to semi-automated dashboard creation.

Friday

There was only one paper session before the capstone address and closing, on Comparisons (video). The View Composition Algebra for Ad Hoc Comparison (preview video) is a simple yet powerful concept based on the idea of comparison as a basic interaction.

The capstone by Kerry Magruder on Thinking Visually and Galileo’s Telescopic Discoveries was just wonderful (video). Edward Tufte talks about Galileo’s illustrations in his work, but this was a much more in-depth exploration of this topic. Apparently there was a tour of the History of Science library at Oklahoma University the night before where some folks got to see these manuscripts, but I didn’t realize it was happening until after.

Takeaways

It’s really hard to summarize a week-long conference with multiple tracks like this, but the main takeaway for me from this conference is that the IEEE VIS community is full of really fascinating, open, and excited people doing really interesting, multi- and cross-disciplinary research. I would recommend anyone interested in visualization to check out some of the videos above and maybe consider attending either remotely or in-person if it’s nearby enough to travel (next year it will be in Melbourne!). 

Coda

I didn’t attend the alt.VIS workshop, but looking at this blog post, the paper entitled “* (Name Of This Paper Can Be Automatically Generated)” presented there is pretty spot-on!

The post IEEE VIS 2022 Highlights appeared first on Nightingale.

The ways in which we interact with data and visualization may look and feel very different in the years to come. Many of our current interfaces to visual representations of data can be described as WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) systems, assuming indirect manipulation via a mouse and keyboard. Recent advances in artificial intelligence / machine learning, computer vision, environmental / physiological sensing, and material sciences may very well shape our future interactions with data.

Between October 29th and November 2nd 2022, the 35th annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) took place in Bend, Oregon. It was the first in-person research conference that I attended in over three years. I was there along with more than 480 attendees from 25 countries, including more than 270 graduate and undergraduate students. UIST is a highly selective conference, soliciting the best new research on interface design: of 372 research paper submissions, 98 (26%) were accepted to be presented at the symposium. UIST is also a great place to experience demonstrations of new interface prototypes, and this year didn’t disappoint with 64 demos. In addition to technical paper presentations and demos, there were two excellent keynote speakers (Ted Chiang and Marissa Mayer) as well as two shorter “vision” presentations by Mind in Motion author Barbara Tversky and Microsoft’s Chief Scientist Jaimie Teevan.

Unlike research conferences that are devoted to data visualization (such as IEEE VIS), UIST is broader in scope. While there was one session devoted specifically to information and visualization interfaces, I want to highlight a few interesting ideas and opportunities across the conference and comment on how they may be applicable to the future of data visualization. There were eighteen paper presentation sessions over the course of three days, each featuring between four and six presentations, with two sessions taking place concurrently. Given this schedule, I was only able to see about half of the presentations (all sessions were recorded and can be viewed on YouTube). Below, I include links to short video previews and open-access copies of the relevant articles where available. 

Given my role as a researcher specializing in data visualization, I decided to frame my UIST highlights as questions for future visualization research, design, and development to consider. 

• Can data visualization shape our thoughts like written language does?
• How might we talk about data in engaging ways?
• How can we make sense of relationships in text and network data?
• How might visualization manifest in generative design workflows?
• How can sonification and physicalization help people who are blind or visually impaired people understand sensor data?
• How might we visualize and interact with data in extended reality?
• Could reprogrammable “mixels” and shape-changing materials be used for dynamic data physicalization?
• How can we ensure our data visualization satisfies the 3 Ps of good graphics? 

Can data visualization shape our thoughts like written language does?

The first keynote speaker was award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whose “Story of Your Life” was the basis of the Academy Award nominated 2016 film Arrival. His keynote address reflected on how modern humans have collectively internalized the invention of the alphabet: once we learn to read and write, this technology shapes how we think. By evolving from an oral culture to a literate culture, we now longer had to memorize knowledge and therefore lost a dependency on rhyme and meter as mnemonics.

Modern technology has allowed us to further externalize our cognition, but we haven’t internalized these inventions in the same way that we have with the written word, leaving us with the feeling that modern technology is dehumanizing: we rely on artifacts and devices, and we feel paralyzed when we are without them. I prefer to see visualization as a humanizing technology, one that makes data more interpretable and accessible. Moreover, given that we are capable of visualizing data using everyday objects and without the aid of computers, have we internalized the process of data visualization in some capacity?

In rare cases, it would appear as though some exceptionally gifted individuals have internalized mathematical notations and the structure of computer code into their thinking, but unlike the alphabet, these technologies are not co-extensive with speech; thus, this internalization is not as broadly applicable to all human activities. These observations left me wondering about the ways by which we might internalize aspects of data visualization into our thinking, and the power of visualization as a communicative language. 

Finally, Chiang remarked that human alphabets are both easy to recognize and easy to write, and he asked whether there are shapes that are easy to recognize but difficult to generate without the aid of a computer? I would argue that many manifestations of data visualization fit this description, and particularly those that employ shape as a visual encoding channel. For instance, vision science research by Liqiang Huang (2020) would suggest that basic geometric shapes that are easy to draw may not be as perceptually separable as shapes that vary according to the dimensions of segmentability, compactness, and spikiness, which include shapes that may be difficult for humans (but easy for computers) to draw.

How might we talk about data in engaging ways?

My own contribution to UIST 2022 was a new approach for presenting data to remote audiences via augmented webcam video (preview), in which interactive and semi-transparent visualization overlays are composited with the speaker’s video. These overlays are also interactive and yet touchless, in that highlighting and selection are made possible with continuous bimanual hand-tracking. Former Tableau Research intern Brian Hall of the University of Michigan presented our paper, which received an honorable mention for best paper. We also invited attendees to try out our prototype at the symposium’s demo exhibit. 

In the same vein, Jian Liao of the University of Calgary presented RealityTalk (preview), in which webcam presentations of multimedia content could be augmented in real time with kinetic typography of keywords, and the invocation of images and media associated with those keywords, placed wherever a hand or tracked object happens to be within the video frame. I was intrigued by the prospect of combining this technique with ours, in which you could invoke dynamic visualization content and value or category annotations by uttering keywords associated with data.

How can we make sense of relationships in text and network data?

One of the highlights of the visualization session was the Scholastic project (preview) presented by Matt Hong of the University of North Carolina. For anyone who has ever undertaken a qualitative thematic analysis of a text corpus (e.g., documents, transcripts), the Scholastic tool visualizes this corpus at multiple reading levels, one that prioritizes human-in-the-loop semi-automated clustering that aims to remain transparent and trustworthy, aspects that are critical to interpretive analysis.

Moving beyond text corpora to large article collections and their related metadata, the FeedLens project (preview) presented by Harman Kaur of the University of Michigan is a new approach to faceted search that recognizes distinct entity types related to a search query. For example, consider the task of ranking cities to move to based on your cuisine preferences in your locale, which involves several entity types: cities, types of cuisine, and local restaurants. Kaur and colleagues implemented FeedLens as an extension to Semantic Scholar (a tool for searching the academic literature), visualizing the rank of related entities (papers, authors, institutions, journals) as small inline charts associated with different queries (or lenses).

Continuing with the theme of connecting entities through data, the next project I highlight has to do with relating disparate data sources across the web, often a tedious manual affair of rectifying differences across APIs and confirming relationships in the data. The Wikxhibit project (preview | wikxhibit.org) presented by Tarfah Alrashed of MIT CSAIL leverages WikiData as a universal join table and offers a low-code approach to building rich applications around the data linkages curated by the WikiData community. This work also suggests the possibility of visualizing these relationships explicitly as part of these applications without having to write too much code.

How might visualization manifest in generative design workflows?

Vivian Liu of Columbia University presented OPAL (preview), a tool that uses large language models and text-to-image prompting to generate illustrations for news articles, encompassing article keywords and tones. While the articles considered were primarily feature and opinion pieces, I was curious about the potential for semi-automated reporting about data: trends, before / after comparisons, and relationships. I recalled Gafni et al’s Make-a-Scene image-prompting tool (2022) that allows for shape input to steer image generation, as well as Coelho and Mueller’s Infomages project (2020), which introduced a technique that finds images within an image collection containing shapes that can be used to emphasize or draw attention to data trends. Combining all three techniques could be an interesting way of generating news illustrations for data stories.

Generative design can be a fruitful and serendipitous approach to design (including creative visualization design). However, it can be difficult for designers to maintain a sense of agency and control over the parameters. Yuki Koyama of the Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology presented an approach that frames design as a Bayesian optimization problem (preview), wherein an intelligent assistant observes an iterative design process and makes peripheral suggestions based on the current state of the design, providing the ability to incrementally “blend” suggestions with the designers’ own creations. 

How can sonification and physicalization help people who are blind or visually impaired understand sensor data?

Interactive systems for monitoring streaming environmental and physiological sensor data are typically not accessible to people who are blind or visually-impaired. To address this gap, the University of Washington’s Venkatesh Potluri presented PSST (preview), a tool for specifying how sensor data could be sonified with continuous changes in pitch and amplitude. Beyond sonification, Potluri and colleagues demonstrated how PSST can physically print sensor data as punch cards for music boxes, thereby combining sonification and physicalization.

How might we visualize and interact with data in extended reality?

Four of the presentation sessions were explicitly devoted to various aspects of extended reality (or XR, encompassing both virtual and augmented reality interfaces). However, XR-related projects also appeared in many of the other sessions. Several projects were affiliated with Meta Reality Labs, who have invested heavily into XR. Given Reality Labs’ platinum-level sponsorship of the conference (disclosure: my employer Tableau was a Bronze-level sponsor of UIST), the recurring XR theme was not unexpected. 

Beginning with visual perception in XR, Zhipeng Li of Tsinghua University showed how color saturation and color value depth cues could help people understand the distance to 3D positions of content in AR applications (preview), complementing other depth cues such as contrast and blur while reserving color hue for encoding other information. Consider how when you look at a distant landscape, points that are farther away seem a little more blue and a little blurrier. One of the examples Li showed was a 3D scatterplot, thereby illustrating the implications for visualization in extended reality.

Moving on from perception to interaction in XR, Hiroki Kaimoto of the University of Tokyo presented a bidirectional interaction between mobile AR and robotic objects (preview), in which small robots obey spatial constraints imposed upon them via a mobile augmented reality application.Conversely, the movement and positions of the small robots can also update graphical elements in the AR display. Seeing this, I could imagine controlling a physicalized unit chart, where each robot represents an entity in the data (as demonstrated by Mathieu Le Goc and colleagues in 2018) which can be repositioned and recategorized manually or through interactive controls in an AR interface.

Being able to interact naturally at fine scales in XR is challenging. Ideally, we should be able to reach out, point, gesture, and make selections with our fingers, without requiring clumsy hand-held paddle devices that are currently used with many XR headsets. Nathan DeVrio and Daehwa Kim (both of Carnegie Mellon University working with Chris Harrison) respectively presented DiscoBand (preview) and EtherPose (preview), wrist-worn devices that track arm, hand, and finger movements. The former uses two arrays of tiny depth cameras, while the latter uses two antennas measuring dielectric loading emanating from the motion of the hand. If we want to make fine selections and perform precise filtering, sorting, and aggregation operations with 3D data visualization, sensing devices such as these prototypes could be very helpful.

As an alternative to hand-held and head-mounted AR displays, acoustic levitation techniques can suspend luminous particle-based holograms in mid-air. However, until recently it was impossible to interact directly with the holograms without distorting or destroying them. Diego Martinez Plasencia of University College London demonstrated TipTrap (preview), an approach that accommodates direct manual selection and deselection of hologram particles. This could be a boon for interacting directly with 3D point cloud visualization, particularly as the 3D resolution of these acoustic levitation displays improves.

Could reprogrammable magnetic “mixels” and heat-triggered shape-changing materials be used for dynamic data physicalization?

The UIST community also offers new ideas that could be applicable to the implementation of dynamic data physicalization. Shape-changing physical displays are often complicated electronic and mechanical devices that are energy-intensive and have limited expressivity. I want to highlight two projects that illustrate promising alternative approaches. 

First, Martin Nisser of MIT CSAIL presented Mixels (preview), short for magnetic pixels. These small cubes have tiles that can selectively and dynamically couple with other tiles, allowing them to assemble into varying 3D configurations when reprogrammed with new magnetic signatures. I could imagine mixels reassembling into physical unit charts, sorting and resorting themselves according to different categorizations of the data. 

Second, Justin Moon of KAIST presented ShrinkCells (preview), an efficient way to change the shape of a 3D-printed object by propagating heat across the individually-printed filaments of the object. Seeing this, I envisioned the implications for continuous or cyclical animated transitions in data physicalization, such as one that represents daily or annual climate patterns. 

How can we ensure our data visualization satisfies the 3 Ps of good graphics?

I’ll conclude my recap with Barbara Tversky’s vision talk to the UIST 2022 attendees. Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford and Columbia Universities, and her 2019 book Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought should be required reading for all visualization practitioners. Her vision talk extended what she had written in her book about how we think in terms of spatial and sequential relations, and how visual tools can help or hinder this thinking. She emphasized the 3 Ps of good graphics: Production, Preference, and Performance, which prompted me to reflect on the visualization tools, the charts, and dashboards we make for others to use and read. When we make visualization tools or visualize data for others, we should consider if and how they can use these tools to produce new representations and new knowledge, if they prefer these tools to other approaches (including those delivered in other modalities), and how they use these tools to perform a task or make a decision. 

The post At the Vanguard of Interface Design appeared first on Nightingale.

With the data visualization field always rapidly evolving, this space is a great way to contribute to Outlier 2022 and to share some of your most exciting projects. Whether you’re looking to simply share, or get constructive feedback, consider submitting your visualization and taking part in the exhibition!

What is the Outlier Viz Exhibit?

The Outlier Viz Exhibit is a virtual space to share data visualisations from Outlier’s attendees to inspire, give, or receive constructive feedback, or to give and receive praise and encouragement. 

Using a MURAL board as a central location, visualizations made by attendees can be shared in a community space. Attendees are encouraged to browse and participate on the MURAL board, using it to comment and connect with each other. The exhibition is meant to be a space for sharing only and not intended to be a contest or competition of any kind.

Submit your visualization

If you want to submit to the exhibition, fill out this survey!

We ask that you follow a few guidelines when submitting your visualization:

• You must be a ticket holder to submit a data visualization.
• The visualization must not contain any offensive materials and must abide by the DVS Code of Conduct and Outlier Rules of Engagement.
• The visualization cannot be promotional or an advertisement for any commercial purpose.

All submissions will be accepted from now until the end of Outlier 2022! Yes, even during the conference we will accept new submissions as long as they follow the guidelines, and will update the Exhibition throughout.

Join us!

You’re required to be an Outlier attendee to submit a visualization to the Exhibit. If you don’t have your ticket yet, you can snag one here! Come ready with plenty of compliments to give out and leave fully inspired!

The post Submit Your Work for the Outlier Viz Exhibit! appeared first on Nightingale.

What are unconference sessions?

Outlier is divided into two types of sections: curated and open, with the schedule alternating between the two.

Curated sections will look similar to the standard “conference structure”, with a higher focus on talks, with only one talk at the time. The open sections will consist of unconference sessions, will have several tracks running concurrently, and will be fleshed out based on the interests and preferences of the attendees.

These open portions will allow all attendees to create their own session. These sessions can be about almost anything. They could include talks, discussions, panels, games, or an AMA (Ask Me Anything). Most will probably be dataviz-related, but some might not! Nevertheless, they’ll all connect people from the dataviz space who have similar interests.

Creating an unconference session

These sessions are made for attendees by attendees; therefore, you will need to be a ticket holder to be involved. You’ll be able to sign up to host a session through the conference app on Android, Apple, or through the web app. Applications will open the night before the conference starts (February 3rd).

Even though you cannot sign up to host a session just yet, you can start planning! What kind of session will you create? Will you host it yourself, or with someone else?

Session types

For the most part, sessions can be whatever you like! You can do a session in any style or format, we’ve included some examples below. Where possible please provide the style/format in your description so people know what they are signing up for.

• Talk
• Panel
• Discussion
• Q&A / AMA (Ask Me Anything)
• Hands On (e.g., workshop, hackathon, sketching contest)
• Fun / Misc (e.g., games, music, etc.)

Ideas for session topics

This is totally up to you (as long as it does not violate the Code of Conduct, of course), so we’d suggest whatever you’re excited about! We imagine a lot of the sessions will be focused around data visualization topics. However, we also encourage people to plan sessions around topics that are only minorly tangential to data visualization, as well as topics that have NOTHING to do with data visualization. We believe that two people connecting over non-dataviz topics (e.g., animal welfare, hiking, etc.) or non-dataviz activities (e.g., yoga, games, etc.) is also a really great thing and we want to encourage that.

Some examples of potential sessions are:

• Start an interesting debate or discussion about deep issues (e.g., a discussion around the data visualization of issues such as COVID-19 or election polling)
• Organize or suggest a panel on a popular topic
• Lead a workshop on your favorite tool
• Host an AMA; share your expertise
• Host a game, lead a yoga session, or some other fun activity
• Give an informal talk on something you’re excited about
• Share your obscure hobby
• Tell us about a niche area of dataviz you’ve fallen into
• Share a live-coding session
• Whatever else you can think of!

Join us!

We encourage you to start planning your sessions! We’ll be sending details to attendees on how to sign up soon. If you don’t have your tickets yet, you can snag them here!

The post Host an Unconference Session! appeared first on Nightingale.

As my departure from the board draws nearer, I want to impart some of the goals I’ve had in mind since the first meetings around a Data Visualization Society conference, what went into reaching those goals and making it a reality, and what I hope for the future of Outlier.

Goals of Outlier

When we were first starting to plan Outlier back in January of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t yet hit, and we were planning for a live, in-person conference. Although the format of Outlier was required to adjust, the goals and vision have remained the same. The goals of Outlier from the beginning have always been to create a space where attendees can make connections, inspire others, and learn from others — all while keeping accessibility and inclusion at the heart of our planning decisions. 

Make connections

One of my favorite things about conferences is the ability to meet new people and make new connections. At in-person conferences, these connections happen through through chats with your neighbor between talks, break-time hallway conversations, and at evening outings.

Transitioning to an online conference brought with it the challenge of enabling these kinds of connections without the benefit of being together in the same physical space. We felt it incredibly important that Outlier should have regular opportunities for networking and connecting with others in a variety of forms. We see enabling these kinds of connections and conversations as one of the biggest measures of success for an online conference. We don’t want to create an online conference for which you could watch the videos later and still get the same experience. We want you to leave with new connections in the field, and really, new friends!  

Some of the ways people connect at Outlier are through chatting on Slack and in the events platform, taking part in the speed meeting networking sessions, and — the one I’m most excited about — through unconference discussions and hangouts, which enable attendees to congregate around a particular topic or activity, and meet others in the dataviz space with similar interests. 

Inspire others

In addition to a curated lineup of speakers, we wanted to create a space where everyone has the opportunity to have a voice. This is where the lightning talks and unconference sessions come in. With lightning talks, many are able to share their expertise through five-minute presentations. And the unconference portions enable anyone in attendance to create a session.

These unconference sessions can be about almost anything and have, in the past, included talks, workshops, discussions, panels, games, AMAs (Ask Me Anything), and even virtual karaoke! Many sessions were dataviz related, but some were not! Nevertheless, they all connect people from the dataviz space who have similar interests. The unconference sessions are not curated ahead of time. They are shaped by participants who want to share their expertise or lead a discussion or activity, giving everyone a chance to share, and creating a specially curated experience created by and for those in attendance. 

Be Inspired

It goes without saying that one of the main reasons for attending a conference is the ability to learn from others and be inspired. We want attendees to leave feeling they have learned something new and with excitement about the work that is being done in the field. We do our best to meet this goal by selecting an amazing panel of speakers. 

We also feel that meeting the goals listed above contributes to a more inspiring experience. By giving everyone a chance to host an unconference session and have a voice, you may find inspiration from someone you’ve never heard of, or where you least expect it. We believe this inspiration can come both from people who are well-known within the data visualization field, and from people who are up-and-coming. This is an important opportunity for anyone interested in sharing their perspective and exploring new concepts.

Ensuring accessibility, inclusion, and diversity

One of the clear advantages of an online event is that, since it removes the barrier of people needing to travel to one location, it is automatically more inclusive and accessible than an in-person equivalent, and is able to draw a more diverse group of speakers and attendees.

Outlier’s slogan is “celebrating the global data visualization community.” We have worked hard both years to attract a diverse panel of speakers, spanning across all time zones and multiple languages. By ensuring a diverse set of speakers, we are better able to provide content that reaches across barriers. We dedicate a lot of time to creating an accessible environment where each person in attendance feels included, represented, and heard.

We also felt it was important to create a pricing structure that is accessible. There are a few reasons for this:

• We want to reach a global audience. It’s simply not realistic to assume that the same pricing will work worldwide.
• We want to make sure students are able to attend
• The pandemic led to a rough year+ for a lot of people, creating an environment where some are simply less able to justify expenses like this. But it doesn’t mean they don’t still want to learn!

Therefore, we offer three tiers of pricing that allow people to pay what they’re able, as well as an option for people to request a free ticket should they need to. No matter what ticket people acquire, they all get the same experience.

Speaker selection

From the start, our primary goal in terms of talk curation was to find and amplify diverse global perspectives on data visualization. Here’s how we approached our speaker selection and planning processes to reach these goals.

A public “call for speakers” 

Ensuring a public call for speakers provided a space for anyone interested to apply and helped us to avoid the pitfalls of an invite-only lineup, which does not leave much room for people who are not already well-known in the field. We spread this call as widely as possible, translating it into many different languages (with thanks to our volunteer translators) and sharing the link in data visualization communities from parts of the world that visualization conferences have traditionally had trouble reaching. 

Thanks to this open call for speakers, we received many applications from people who are doing amazing work, but who we’d never heard of, and who we were excited to highlight on the Outlier stage.

In addition, as a committee, we also did our best to have a fair speaker selection process that does not preference fame and ignores organizational affiliations, and instead prizes originality of the talk, relevance to the audience, and diversity of perspective. Additionally, we do not give any curated speaker slots to sponsors in return for sponsorship (which is in line with our no-pitch policy).

Mentorship program for first-time speakers

Many people find public speaking a scary experience. To help address this, we created a mentorship program where more seasoned speakers can sign up to mentor speakers with less experience, and the new speakers can sign up to be a mentee. The aim here is to provide new speakers with support and help them to feel more comfortable and to encourage first-time speakers to apply and speak.

Allowing speakers to present in their own language

Language is another major barrier that often reduces the diversity of speakers at events. To address this, we encourage speakers to present in whatever language they feel most comfortable in. All our talks are pre-recorded and captioned in English to improve the experience for both speakers and attendees. 

Covering a diversity of topics

We know that visualization is a wide, multidisciplinary field, which encompasses a huge range of subjects. These subjects include activism, health, business, academia, design, journalism, teaching, and many, many more. When choosing our speaker line-up, we aim to cover a diversity of subjects that matches the diversity of the visualization community, and fill in the gaps that other conferences miss, complementing rather than competing with others in the space.

Paying speakers for their work

Preparing and presenting a talk is work, and we believe that work should be paid. All speakers selected for the curated portion of an Outlier conference receive an honorarium to help cover the costs of putting together and recording their talk. 

Scheduling talks and events around the clock

With Outlier, we wanted to be careful not to have a completely US- or Euro-centric event. As a global organization, we felt it was important for us to create something truly global. No matter where you live, we believe that ticket holders should be able to enjoy the conference during their waking hours. That’s why we host ~20 hour days, with talks, discussions, and activities spread throughout. 

Looking forward

As Outlier is handed off to a new set of hands, here are some thoughts and hopes to pass on to the upcoming team. 

Staying virtual and global

Two years ago, when I first started, I might have said that a live conference was far superior to a virtual conference. In fact, I 100 percent said that! However, after my experience with Outlier, I have completely changed my tune. 

Now, to me, virtual means: 

• Global and inclusive: People can join from around the world, without worrying about the cost of travel or visas
• Flexible: Deciding for ourselves what a conference should look like.
• Good for the environment: No plane trips required.
• Comfortable: I don’t know about y’all, but I wore pajama bottoms through the whole event last year. ?

Something that I found really interesting was that one of the most common pieces of “negative” feedback we received after the first Outlier was, “I wasn’t able to watch everything live. It was such a bummer to miss things. Why does this conference have such a weird schedule?” 

To be honest, I thought this was one of the biggest compliments we could have gotten because it showed us two things:

1. There was content that people were excited about and were sad to miss
2. If the person missed out on something while they slept in, say, California, that meant that somebody over in India was able to attend, and able to interact with others live at the event. 

This is something I am really proud of. The Data Visualization Society is a global organization and it therefore feels imperative for the conference to maintain this global accessibility.

Maintaining focus on inclusion and accessibility

Accessible pricing, covering all timezones, supporting new and non-English-speaking presenters, and providing opportunities for everyone to have a voice are all part of the effort to create an inclusive and accessible environment. I hope that Outlier not only maintains its current focus on inclusion and accessibility, but also that it actively seeks out new ways to be even more inclusive and accessible. 

Keep thinking outside the box

We worked really hard as a committee to always be thinking outside of the box. One of the first things we did when thinking through Outlier’s inaugural event, was we identified questions that mattered to us — things we wanted to optimize for. After we identified what mattered to us, we started brainstorming them together, and coming up with ideas to answer those questions. We were constantly trying to think about what we were missing, or if we were missing any non-standard ways to approach a problem.

My hope is Outlier organizers continue to think outside the box. I realize this phrase is thrown around all too often, so I want to say it another way to get across what I really mean by this: Don’t default to what’s standard! 

That’s not to say that standard is necessarily bad. It’s just to say that it can be too easy to do what everyone else does without really thinking about it. Let’s keep planning with intentionality. Think about what really matters to the community and to the attendees, and then think about the best ways to reach those goals. ?

Never stop looking for ways to make it better

I am really proud of what the events committee and I have created with Outlier these past two years. I think it’s really something special. I also know that there’s always going to be ways to make it better. I hope that the Outlier team continues to collect feedback, does its best to think about what could be better, and then makes things even more amazing the next time around!

I can’t wait to see what comes next. ?

See you at Outlier!

Thank you to the events committee for all their amazing work. Special shout out to Evelina Judeikytė, who has been working with me as the Outlier Director this year to ensure that the show would keep running smoothly even as my available time decreased. 

As the year goes on, I urge you to keep an eye out for opportunities to be involved in future editions of Outlier, whether it’s to speak, join the events committee, or plan an unconference session. And I hope to see you all at the upcoming two days of Outlier (February 4-5 2022)! Perhaps we’ll cross paths in an unconference session or chat hang. ? 

Until then. ?

The post Creating an Inclusive Global Dataviz Conference appeared first on Nightingale.

As we finalize the event, we wanted to share a little bit about how we chose our speaker lineup. From the start, our goal was to find and amplify diverse global perspectives on data visualization, and we built our speaker selection process accordingly. Here’s what we did.

The selection process

Call for speakers

We started preparing for the call for speakers in early April. We spread this call as widely as possible, translating it into eight different languages (thanks to our volunteer translators) and sharing the link across the globe, with extra care to share it in parts of the world that visualization conferences have traditionally had trouble reaching. Our application window was open for a little over a month and we received a total of 134 submissions.

Selection methodology

A team of six people (from the DVS events committee) evaluated all 130+ speakers, with the goal of eventually narrowing down to 26 talks. We have done our best to create a fair speaker selection process that does not preference fame and ignores organizational affiliations, and instead prizes originality of the talk, relevance to the audience, and diversity of perspective. Additionally, we do not give any curated speaker slots to sponsors in return for sponsorship (which is in line with our no-pitch policy).

We first did an initial round of rating, which resulted in a list of talks, ranked by their evaluation scores; however, we can’t just take the top 26 talks and call it a day. Why’s that? Outlier  aims to reflect and celebrate the entire data visualization community. We work to create an environment where each person in attendance will feel included, represented, and heard. Therefore, this is the point in the selection process at which we need to start thinking about balance. Some of the criteria for which we do our best to balance are: geographic location, tooling, background/focus, visibility/seniority in the field, and a general diversity of perspective. 

To start thinking about this balance, each reviewer was next tasked with coming up with a lineup—as if they were creating our own conference and doing their best to come up with a good balance—so that we could see where there was overlap.

It’s worth noting that, at this stage, narrowing a pool of talks from 130 down to 26 is really, really hard. Our combined lists after this activity included twice as many talks as there were spots available. Alas, after narrowing down our list, we then mapped the speakers based on very important criteria to us—geographic spread, topics covered, first-time speakers, etc.—and had a long discussion with the team about it. It was a hard process full of difficult decisions, and having to say no to some truly fantastic talks because there simply wasn’t space for them all. However, we were eventually able to settle on our final set of talks.

The 2022 lineup

Our final lineup includes 26 curated talks and 36 speakers for the two days of conference. For the full list of speakers, take a look here.

Lineup breakdown 

Note: These statistics are based on who we accepted to speak. There may be some slight variation if any speakers drop out.

• Across all selected talks, 37 percent of the speakers are from North America, 34 percent are from Europe, 14 percent are from APAC, six percent are from South America, six percent are from the Middle East, and three percent are from Africa.
• 57 percent of speakers use she/her pronouns, while 43 percent use he/him.
• 20 percent of speakers described themselves as first-time speakers, early career professionals, or students.

*Note: the geographic breakdown is categorized by the 2021 grouping to allow comparability between years.

To view our 2021 statistics, read last year’s article.

We want your feedback

We are committed to curating a conference that represents the global dataviz community. In order to do our best to encourage speakers to apply from across the diverse data visualization community, and to reach a global audience, we did/are doing the following: 

• Posted a public “Call for Speakers” to provide a space for anyone interested to apply, making the process accessible to new or lesser-known practitioners
• Encouraged first-time speakers with a mentorship program
• Providing support for speakers to present in whatever language is most comfortable to them
• Paying speakers for their work
• Scheduled talks around the clock (~20 hours) to allow for worldwide reach
• Worked to create a final lineup that highlights a balance of perspectives
• Offering other opportunities to present via lightning talks and unconference sessions

We recognize that Western voices are still overrepresented among our curated speaker lineup, and this is primarily because 66 percent of our speaking applications came from North America and Europe. As we progress with future iterations, we are going to continue to work toward expanding our global reach and encouraging applications from the rest of the world. We welcome your ideas on how we can more effectively accomplish that goal. 

Get involved

Stay tuned as we reveal more  information about the conference in the upcoming weeks. Check out the agenda, grab a ticket, sign up to volunteer at the conference, or submit an application to join the DVS Events Committee.

In any case, see you on February 4!

The post Outlier 2022: The Speaker Lineup appeared first on Nightingale.

What are lightning talks?

A lighting talk is a five minutes long address to the attendees on the topic of your choice, and in the language of your choice. This format provides a space for many to quickly share some of their most exciting insights and/or projects. We will group lighting talks together into back-to-back sessions on the main stage, one on each day of the conference. 

Submit your talk

Want to submit a lightning talk? Great! Fill out this survey to submit by February 1st, 2022. 

We ask that you follow a few guidelines when creating your lightning talk video:

• You must be a ticket holder to submit a lightning talk.
• The video must be five minutes or less in its entirety.
• The talk should not contain any offensive materials and must abide by the Data Visualization Society Code of Conduct and Outlier Rules of Engagement.
• Do your best to create a quality video; here are some tips on how to best do this.
• Lighting talks cannot be promotions or advertisements for any commercial purpose.

The “selection”

We are planning to accept all submissions as long as they follow the above guidelines. 

Join us!

You’re required to be an Outlier attendee to submit a lightning talk. If you don’t have your ticket yet, you can snag one here!

The post Send Us Your Lightning Talks! appeared first on Nightingale.

Like last year, we offer multiple pricing options because we don’t want the price of a ticket to be a barrier for anyone who wants to attend Outlier. Additionally, all tickets come with the same all-access offerings. No VIP attendees here!

Below are the different ticketing options available. 

Support Outlier ($299)

Have you had a good year? Is your company paying for your ticket? Offering a little extra helps make it possible for people with less financial resources to attend. We appreciate it enormously! 

Standard Ticket ($159)

We’re working hard to create another quality event and we feel this is good value for what we’ve got planned. We kindly ask you to pay this price if you can. If you’re a general or patron DVS member, you also get a 20% discount for this ticket.

Income Conscious ($59)

We want you to join us! If you can’t afford the standard ticket, please consider this cheaper option. 

FREE* TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE

We genuinely don’t want cost to be a barrier that keeps you from attending. If you’re not able to afford any of the tickets above, you’ll be able to request a free one as of January 2022. Keep an eye on our website for the announcement.

*We’ll only ask you to pay the processing fee of our events platform, which is 10$ per person.

The post Register for Outlier! appeared first on Nightingale.

IEEE VIS ran six days with about eight hours of content daily. With the different tracks running in parallel, it was easy to miss many talks and sessions that we would have loved to attend. Fortunately, it is possible to catch up from the recordings, but that is also a lot of great content to take in and it can be hard to know where to start. 

In this article, we share a few highlights covering various categories of content from the conference. 

Noëlle comments on Vis For Social Good, VizSec, Evaluation of Complex Interactive Systems (meetup), and Accessible Visualization and Natural Language.

Matt comments on Happy Surprises in Visualization Design, Multimodal Manifestations of Data, Novel Visual Encoding Combinations, Tools for Visual Communication with Data, and Reflecting on Research and Practice.

Yiren comments on presentations from Vis X AI, Interaction, and Immersive environments. 

Noelle’s highlights

This is my second virtual VIS, and second year as a Student Volunteer (SV). And like last year, the huge amount of interesting content at VIS can be overwhelming. Fortunately, between the networking, meetups, and SV duties, I could attend a few subsets of sessions and activities. Here are my highlights:

Visualization for Social Good

The Visualization for Social Good (Vis4Good) workshop aims “to provide a central venue for work that critiques, defines, or explores the impact of data visualization on society.” This year, Vis4Good kicked off with a keynote about the “Do No Harm Guide – Applying Racial Equity Awareness in Data Visualization” by Jon Schwabish and Alice Feng from Urban Institute. The Do No Harm Guide brings the data visualization community’s attention to the variety of groups, identities, and demographics of the people we are focusing on or communicating with. Check out the keynote video  to learn how we, the data visualization community, can contribute to ongoing discussions about racial equity. 

Vis4Good ran the whole Monday morning with other notable works on the importance of data visualization in ongoing pandemic-related discussions, and works showing the measurable impact of data visualization on the quality of life in local communities.

Visualization for Cybersecurity

This year, a total of ten papers were accepted at VizSec, which is double the number from last year. The presented research covered topics in threat detection, computer forensics, software vulnerability analysis, machine learning, and privacy. 

It is interesting to see how the focus of research related to data visualization for cybersecurity has evolved along with the cybersecurity domain itself. The keynote presentation highlighted the lessons learned, progress from the 17 years of VizSec, and especially how many of the different tools and techniques developed by VizSec researchers are finding their application within different industries. Examples of these applications include the BUCEPHALUS tool from the AWARE Sapienza lab, which uses organizations’ vulnerabilities report to help reduce cyber-exposure, and research by Fabian Böhm et al., which is used by experts analysts for conducting live digital forensics investigations. 

A second highlight from this year’s VIzSec is the best paper by Robert Gove et al. on using summarization techniques to reduce narrative sizes in incident logs and reports. This work shows how information in incident reports, like tabular log data, can be transformed into a useful format such as dynamic graphs, then further summarized, while keeping consistency and achieving succinctness.

Meetup: Evaluating Complex Interactive Systems

Unlike regular sessions, meetups at VIS are centered around one specific topic, a discussion of on-going projects by the moderators. Meetups are opportunities for the attendees to exchange their methods for addressing open questions in a field.

One of Wednesday’s meetups was about Evaluating Complex Interactive Visualizations, organized by Carolina Nobre, Alexander Lex, and Lane Harrison. It started off with a presentation by Carolina about their recent work, followed by attendees sharing their approaches to evaluating complex or multivariate visualizations. 

Questions that were discussed during this one-hour meeting also included: how to train novice users to use complex data visualizations, what type of experiments should be designed to train them, and what kind of interaction data should be captured to evaluate complex data visualizations. 

Meetup: VisBuddies

VisBuddies brings together new and returning VIS attendees with similar interests. Newcomers are paired with experienced researchers in the field, and returning attendees can also meet members joining VIS for the first time.  

This year, VisBuddies took place Tuesday on Zoom and about 150 registered participants met in groups with their buddies in breakout rooms. The highlight of this year’s meetup wass that the virtual format brought new attendees from different regions of the world who perhaps wouldn’t have been able to join otherwise.

VisBuddies is one of my favorite activities at the conference. If you are planning to attend VIS in the future, I recommend signing up for the VIS Buddies meetup to enjoy the sense of community through new connections and even start new collaborations. 

Accessible Visualization and Natural Language 

This was one of the sessions I was very much looking forward to. As someone interested in the combination of data visualization and natural language, I was happy to look at the challenges to make data visualizations more accessible from different perspectives and in different applications as well. 

First, the work by Alan Lundgard et al. analyzed textual descriptions of visualizations such as captions and alternative texts and derived four levels of the semantic content that these descriptions convey. The highlight of their talk was that the mixed-method evaluation showed that authors of chart descriptions are almost always sighted, but what sighted authors believe is useful in chart descriptions differs from what is actually useful to users who are blind. 

Crescentia Jung et al.‘s work, “Communicating Visualizations without Visuals: Investigation of Visualization Alternative Text for People with Visual Impairments” is also about descriptive texts. This three-phase study surveyed the current practices regarding the use of alternative texts in academic research papers in 2019 and 2020 of the VIS & TVCG, ASSETS, and CHI collections and found that only 40 percent of the figures contained alternative texts. They observed that some of these texts even use structures that do not provide any useful information for people who are blind.  Their semi-structured interviews with 22 participants with visual impairment has surfaced the participants’ motivation to understand a visualization, their mental mode of the visualization, and most importantly, new information and style needs for future alternative texts. 

My third highlight from this session is the presentation about “Words of Estimative Correlation: Studying Verbalizations of Scatterplots.” In this work, Rafael Henkin and Cagatay Turkay use crowdsourced experiments and NLP pipelines to collect and categorize utterances from participants, and understand the different ways they verbalize correlation seen through scatterplots. From one of the experiments in which participants verbally describe the relationship between two variables in a scatterplot, the findings comprise two categories: the group of five Concepts (description of elements of the data and plots), the group of five Traits (words qualifying and quantifying the concepts). Overall, the study not only showcases the different combinations of concepts and traits that people use to talk correlation in scatterplots about data visualizations, but also opens interesting research questions around the general use of verbalization with data visualizations. 

Student Volunteers Party

This is not really a session, but as a proud student volunteer myself, I feel compelled to mention the hard work that the student volunteers put in to help run the conference smoothly. SVs are PhD and Masters students from colleges and universities around the world. For this second virtual VIS, SVs worked an average of fifteen hours as tech support or session moderators. We are the ones behind the countdowns before going live, or the copy-paste of unanswered Slido questions on Discord. We are grateful for every participant’s patience and collaboration, for our SV chairs (Nicole Sultanum, Beatrice Gobbo, Bon Adriel Aseniero, Juan Trelles), and the captains who kept everything neat, organized, and enjoyable. And most importantly, our hats off to the Tech Chairs whom we thought were machines, but they’re actually hard-working beautiful humans. 

Matt’s highlights

IEEE VIS 2021 was my tenth VIS conference. Like last year, I was missing opportunities to connect with colleagues in person, though at least I was fortunate to attend a satellite event at the University of Washington (video), which had its own Pacific-time program of lightning talks and panel discussions. 

There is always plenty to see at VIS, and like my co-authors, I have only seen a small subset of the 151 paper presentations and the content presented in the conference’s associated events. My personal highlights, beyond the work that I presented (written about here and here), align with my interests in visualization as a creative medium for communication, so my coverage is skewed toward a few thematically-related paper sessions and two associated events: the VIS Arts program (visap.net) and the Visualization for Communication workshop (viscomm.io).

Happy Surprises in Visualization Design

Whenever a visualization project introduces a unique visual encoding or incorporates a new visual metaphor, I love hearing about the process that led to the final design. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg’s capstone address delivered at the end of the conference told several of these process stories, focusing particularly on what they described as happy surprises in visualization design: the emergent or unexpected visual phenomena resulting from counterintuitive design choices or oversights in the implementation (“bugs might be features”), revealing aspects of the data with a novel and memorable visual structure. One viewer’s response to one of their projects perfectly captures this phenomena: “[the visualizations] look like art and make you look twice, then all of a sudden you are reading, thinking, feeling good, learning.” Of course, to achieve responses like this, Fernanda and Martin remind us that, “if you don’t try a lot of things, you’re going to miss stuff.”

The theme of serendipity (or “beautiful mistakes”) in visualization design was also evident in several other projects presented earlier in the week. The DaRT project (presented by Rene Cutura) is one instance of this; admittedly discovered by accident, Cutura and colleagues described how their attempts to reconstruct photographs and artworks using alternative Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques resulted both in oddly compelling images as well as new insights into the behavior of the different DR techniques. 

Our own Diatoms project similarly aspired to happy surprises in visualization design. We considered the potential of shifting a visualization designer’s agency from making individual visual encoding choices to governing a semi-random encoding channel sampling process, ideally revealing a few promising encoding combinations that would have otherwise been overlooked. 

Inspiration for novel visualization design can come from unlikely sources; implementation oversights, unusual input data, and random sampling are just some of the new ways by which we can be inspired to visualize data. However, some of the best ideas come from stepping away from the data; in a discussion of how visualization practitioners overcome design fixation and unlock their creative potential (an interview study led by Chorong Park), we heard how practitioners find inspiration at museums and galleries, from walks in nature, and even from visual associations revealed to them in dreams.

Novel Visual Encoding Combinations

Each year at VIS, I find myself on the lookout for novel visual encodings, or new ways of combining encodings. This is particularly evident in the design of glyphs, or compact spatial arrangements of multiple marks where each mark and its visual properties are associated with an attribute of the data. Glyphs often appear in small multiples arrangements, where each glyph corresponds with a particular data point. Like our Diatoms project mentioned above, the GlyphCreator project presented by Lu Ying proposed a new approach to glyph design, one focusing on circular glyphs and a deep learning approach to transfer visual encoding assignments from example glyphs. 

While GlyphCreator and Diatoms propose alternative approaches to glyph visualization, I also spotted some unique instances of glyph design in other VIS presentations. Two of which were found in the VIS Arts program: Wang Yifang presented circular glyphs representing properties of the Book of Songs from China’s late Zhou Dynasty, while Song Anqi presented glyphs that represented aspects of Tibetan calligraphy. Other examples of glyph design could be found in a design space of anthropographics presented by Luiz Morais, where each glyph exhibited several visual properties mapped to different attributes of an individual person. I’m particularly captivated by compact combinations of data marks and figurative elements within glyphs, recalling Lydia Byrne’s 2019 critical analysis of this part of the visualization design space. 

Multimodal Manifestations of Data

Between discussions around accessibility in data visualization, a workshop on human-data-interaction, a data sonification workshop, and a conference session dedicated to data physicalization, it is evident that the VIS community is thinking more deliberately about non-visual representations of data. In a VIS Arts Program presentation by Karin von Ompteda, we were introduced to the term data manifestation, which I feel is particularly useful for describing multimodal representations of data. Many of the projects described by VISAP keynote speaker Jer Thorp could be described in this way, such as his light and sound installation of seismic glacier activity in a public Calgary plaza, which you can read more about in his excellent 2021 book Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future. 

Perhaps the most stunning data manifestation I saw at VIS 2021 was the Life in the Deep project presented by Jessica Kendall-Bar. This project was a spectacular blend of sonification, animation, and visualization concerning the behaviour of marine mammals, with multiple outcomes targeted at scientists and the general public alike.

Another fascinating data manifestation was the Deep Connection project presented by Marilene Oliver. Deep Connection is a virtual reality installation combining medical scan visualization, sonification, and the triggering of music and animation from viewer interaction, namely holding the virtual hand of a patient and stepping into the volume occupied by the patient’s body. 

Finally, I’ll highlight two data manifestation projects where the viewing experiences combine visualization with output from generative models: Interspecies Umwelten (presented by Joel Ong) and Invisible Pixel (presented by Junlin Zhu). The former communicates the behavior of microscopic algae both visually and through poetry generated by an instance of GPT2 trained on a corpus of Beckett. The latter visually summarizes a massive corpus of videos dedicated to capturing Chinese rural life not only via abstract visualization, but also via images generated with a text-to-image model, generated from the videos’ transcripts, comments, and text metadata. With a recent and growing interest in generative models and particularly in multimodal applications of GANs, we should expect to see more multimodal data manifestations leveraging these techniques in the coming months and years.

Tools for Visual Communication with Data 

While there were no general-purpose interactive visualization authoring tools debuting at this year’s conference along the lines of 2020’s StructGraphics or 2018’s Charticulator, there were several new tools and libraries introduced that address specific aspects of (interactive) visualization authoring. 

First, there was Atlas.js (presented by Zhicheng Liu, who had previously led the Data Illustrator visualization authoring tool project). Atlas is a procedural–rather than declarative–grammar for generating charts. It is informed by the lessons learned while implementing interactive chart construction for Data Illustrator, which involved some fairly complicated state management. Liu and colleagues now invite those developing their own interactive chart construction tools to use Atlas as an underlying grammar.

One commonality across the other noteworthy tools appearing at VIS 2021 is their offering of design recommendations, so as to support a human-in-the-loop curation approach to visualization construction. For specifying animated transitions between charts, Gemini² , presented by Younghoon Kim, recommends intermediate keyframes using the GraphScape framework. These recommendations manifest as Vega-Lite specifications, so conceivably any future interactive authoring tools built using Vega-Lite could also make use of Gemini’s animated transitions. Ideally, use of these keyframe recommendations will make narrative presentations incorporating sequences of statistical graphics easier to follow, whether they are triggered interactively or recorded as data videos or dataGIFs.

While Gemini considered sequences of charts presented over time, there were also sequences of charts arranged in space. Yngve Kristiansen spoke of situations where you have multiple adjacent charts (as arranged in a dashboard or infographic). It is not unusual for there to be redundancies across the charts, or there may be subtle discrepancies in how the data is represented. For example, adjacent charts might share a quantitative measure, but have unaligned axis domains. The same data could be expressed differently in different charts, or conversely, different data could be expressed in confusingly similar ways in different charts. To alleviate issues such as these, Kristiansen demonstrated a “semantic snapping” tool and rule set implemented within the Visception framework (a Vue.js-based visualization construction framework). The semantic snapping tool recommends ways to reduce redundancy and confusion across a set of adjacent charts, such as by harmonizing or merging them when they share data attributes and visual mappings. This research also realizes the design principles identified by Qu and Hullman with regards to keeping multiple views consistent, aligning these principles with Kindlmann and Scheidegger’s algebraic model for visualization, thereby closing the loop between user research, theory, and application development.

 The last tool that I’ll highlight here is Kori (presented by Shahid Latif), one that recommends ways of interactively synchronizing charts with narrative text. The Kori prototype is essentially a word processor that allows you to add Vega-Lite chart specifications to the margin. As you write in the text editor, entities and references to the charts are subtly flagged (similar to the visual appearance of grammar and spelling issues in other word processors). However, these highlights invite the author to opt into and adjust bindings that highlight and filter content shown in the adjacent charts. The author can also manually add their own bindings. The result is a reading experience where these highlights and filters can be revealed to the reader as they navigate the document. 

Reflecting on Research and Practice

Despite IEEE VIS being a primarily academic affair, I’m always happy to see conversations with practitioners and discussions of their practice at the conference. Many of these conversations happen during the VisInPractice event, an event that I co-organized for the fourth and final time. I would particularly recommend watching a recording of the VisInPractice panel discussing contemporary visualization development ecosystems with Zan Armstrong (Observable), Stephanie Kirmer (project44), Nicolas Kruchten (Plotly), and Krist Wongsuphasawat (Airbnb), moderated by Sean McKenna (Lucid). 

Beyond VisInPractice, I also enjoyed the conversation between Jen Christiansen (Scientific American) and Steven Franconeri (Northwestern University) that kicked off the VisComm workshop. Jen mentioned her growing set of visualization design resources that she shares with practitioners. Noticeably under-represented in her list are resources from the IEEE VIS community, which should be a call to action. Researchers should address more of their writing to practitioners (a call to action that was echoed in the VisInPractice panel discussion on writing about visualization). Later in the week, Paul Parsons presented the results of surveys and interviews with practitioners regarding visualization design, and similarly he found that practitioners are largely unaware of much of the theoretical work from the visualization research community. Moreover, Parsons challenged the visualization research community to question the value of prescriptive design recommendations emanating from our studies. Instead, we should avoid seeing visualization in practice as practical demonstrations of scientific findings, but rather as a practice that has its own forms of knowledge production. In other words, we should do a better job of understanding practitioners’ design knowledge before putting our own design guidance out into the ether.

To end on an optimistic note, I was pleased to see a renewed conversation around aesthetics in communicative visualization sparked by Maryan Riahi and Benjamin Watson’s review paper, one which hopefully leads researchers to stop thinking about aesthetics as something that can be objectively measured and compared, or that it is both possible and desirable to make visualize data in an objectively beautiful way. A project that illustrates this conversation is Caitlin Foley and Misha Rabinovich’s Surface Tension project, in which an aesthetic evoking a sense of disgust can serve as a more powerful communicative tool than one evoking an appreciation of beauty. As with the aesthetics conversation, I was similarly pleased to see Derya Akbaba’s refutation of chartjunk: to be clear, this is not a refutation of a (loosely-defined) category of graphical elements, but a refutation of the concept itself. Akbaba argues that the concept is counterproductive, one used to devalue situated and designerly ways of thinking, and one that ultimately is used to discredit design practices that clash with a popular Tufte-esque minimalism. I feel similarly about the negative connotations of terms like ‘embellishment’ or ‘flourish’, and would prefer to shift the conversation toward effective combinations of figurative and non-figurative elements in visualization design, elements working in conjunction to communicate insights to the viewer. Finally, I argue that a dogmatic avoidance of chartjunk inhibits the incorporation of humor and levity in data visualization design; and as the work of Nigel Holmes, Randall Munroe, and Mona Chalabi shows, humor and levity are some of our most powerful communicative tools.

Yiren’s highlights

This was my second VIS conference and also my second year as a student volunteer. I appreciate that VIS was well organized in a remote format during the pandemic. In this highlight, I summarize a couple of the paper sessions, workshops, symposiums, and application spotlights that inspired me most. 

VIS X AI

On Oct 25th, the 4th workshop on Visualization for AI explainability was launched online. With the rapidly growing complexity of AI, the need for understanding how these AI models work increased. The data visualization community is using its expertise to bring new insights to AI explainability. 

David Ha from Google Brain gave a fantastic talk about using a webpage as a medium for communicating research ideas. He provided several examples of data visualization hosted online. Some of them presented the effects of AI, some of them visualized the AI model, and some of them were interactive web applications where you could tweak the values of the model. 

Beyond explainable AI, the advantage of using a webpage persists for communicating research ideas and outcomes. On one hand, interactive applications and animation convey information in a more accessible way compared to images on paper. On the other hand, it takes much less effort than running original code, which may require a complex environment setting. 

Here are the selected list of websites mentioned in this talk.

• https://otoro.net/ml/pendulum-esp/  Neural network controller
• https://otoro.net/slimevolley/        Neural slime volleyball
• https://otoro.net/ml/neat-playground/ Backprop NEAT
• https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/  Evolving cars with genetic algorithms and Box2D
• http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/ecal13/demo/PCA.html  Interactive PCA graph
• https://mattya.github.io/chainer-DCGAN/  GNN face generator
• https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/index.html  Interactive Image Translation with pix2pix-tensorflow
• https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ Growing Neural cellular automata
• https://distill.pub/2020/selforg/mnist/ Self classifying MNIST Digits
• https://magenta.tensorflow.org/assets/sketch_rnn_demo/index.html Sketch RNN

Interaction

Interaction in data visualization is one of my favorite research topics. This topic combines expressive graphical representations and effective user interaction. In this session, there were many creative works presented.

Gastner et al. showed their work on evaluating the effectiveness of interactive contiguous area cartograms. A cartogram is not a usual map format and researchers believe it to be less effective at communicating data than a traditional choropleth map. This work added interactive features to cartograms and conducted experiments to demonstrate that the effectiveness of cartograms can be improved by adding animation and other interactive features. 

Interacting with data visualization by natural language is an emerging research direction in recent years. Ran Chen presented the innovative grammar – Nebula for interacting with multiple coordinated views via natural language. Nebula users can not only manipulate one data visualization, but they can also interact with multiple linked data visualizations via natural language.

The paper from Yifan Wu et al. is a special one. This paper neither explores innovative interaction methods nor attempts to create interactive data visualization for specific datasets. Instead, they are trying to tackle the problem of distributed data and asynchronous events handling in interactive data visualization. In many complex systems, data is stored in distributed databases, and can only be accessed by a query from the backend due to the large data volume. Developers have to juggle low-level asynchronous database querying while also handling interaction events. They built a middleware named DIEL to address this development challenge.

Immersive Environments, Personal Vis, and Dashboards

Virtual Reality(VR) is not a new field of research, it has lived in research labs for a very long time. However, the new generation VR equipment makes it accessible to public users, and refreshes the interest in this research field. In this paper session, I would like to highlight two papers focused on VR. One focused on fundamental perception questions in the VR environment; another one is a brilliant application of VR.

The work from Kurtis Danyluk et al. compares data visualization in virtual reality and physical visualizations. VR devices make it possible for data visualizations to transcend the limits of 2-D space such as paper and screens. As its name implies, virtual reality is a simulation of the real world. The way we view and interact with data visualization in VR is similar to interacting with physical data visualizations. In this research, they conducted experiments to compare participants’ performance of using VR data visualization and physical data visualization. Though physical data visualization outperformed VR data visualization, they discovered both limitations of current VR devices and new features brought by VR, which are impossible with physical data visualization. They suggest hybrid visualization and interactive features can close the gap between physical and virtual visualizations. 

My second highlight is an application leveraging VR and data visualization to help discover extra insight from data. In recent years, tactic analysis is widely used in racket sports. Researchers use data visualization to support expert evaluation of tactics data. However, for tactic analysis, 3-D data visualization can reveal every spatial attribute of tactic data, which provides better insights to discover patterns. TIVEE paired 3-D data visualization with virtual reality devices, allowing users to explore and explain badminton tactics from multiple levels.

The Road Ahead

Virtual IEEE VIS 2021 was another rich experience thanks to the efforts of all committees, organizers, and student volunteers. IEEE VIS 2022 is scheduled to take place in Oklahoma City and we are already looking forward to reconnecting with our community. In the meantime, take advantage of the recorded talks and presentations and catch up on all your missed events online. You can navigate through this year’s schedule here. Be sure to let us know your own highlights! 

The post Highlights from IEEE VIS 2021 appeared first on Nightingale.

As we gear up for the next edition in February 2022, we’re excited to announce that our Call for Speakers is now open!

We invite you to fill out this speaker application form if you’d like to give a talk at the conference. Speaking at Outlier is a great way to build out your network, show off your skills to potential clients and collaborators, and help the next generation of data visualization professionals by sharing your knowledge.

We were able to recruit a diverse range of speakers from all over the world last year, and we’re working hard towards the same goal of showcasing a diversity of perspectives in the data visualization space for Outlier 2022. The conference aims to reflect and celebrate the global visualization community by supporting speakers from around the globe, spanning across all time zones, and supporting talks given in multiple languages.

Never given a talk before? No problem! Do you feel too junior to apply? You have a unique perspective to share! Do you want to give a talk in your first language (that might not be English)? Fine with us! In fact, we strongly encourage you to apply.

To get a better understanding of the topics covered at Outlier, check out the talks from 2021.

Apply!

The deadline for submissions is October 10, 2021. We’re looking forward to seeing all of your applications. Apply here. Good luck!

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In an attempt to get a diverse lineup of speakers, we are collating a list of organizations to which we could reach out and advertise the call to speakers. Here is the list from last year. Who are we missing this time around? Add them to the list! And if you have a contact there, reach out to us and let us know.

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The post Outlier is back in 2022 – Apply to speak! appeared first on Nightingale.