Speakers
We are pleased to announce the following Featured Speakers for the 2011 workshop:
Jerome Cukier
Abstract:
Let users make their own story. When you want to pass a message across with the help of visualization, you have the option of making this message more digestible and memorable. In this form of communication ,you are trying to get your audience to accept your point of view. This can be difficult, however, on very disputed subjects where people can have passionate, though not necessarily rational, opinions. Another option is then to use the interactivity of visualizations and present your now active audience with a model where they can try various approaches to solve a problem. The goal of this strategy is not only to show that the approach you are defending is successful while others fail, but also to let your users come to this realization by themselves.
Bio: Jerome Cukier is data editor at the OECD. He works on data communication, and manages the OECD Factblog which features economic stories illustrated with charts. Prior to that, he managed a videogames development studio. Jerome holds an MBA from the University of Texas as Austin and a masters degree from EM Lyon.
Steven Drucker
Abstract:
Data Narratives: Telling Stories about Data. The tools required to create data narratives are different from either the tools used to explore visualizations, or the tools used to create presentations or movies. We’ll briefly describe some of these differences, outline some component features of a tool used to create data narratives (data, sequences, transitions, highlights & annotations, comparison & contrast), and show a prototype system.
Bio: Dr. Steven M. Drucker has been at Microsoft Research for over 16 years. He is currently is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Visual User Experience group at Microsoft Research (MSR) focusing on human computer interaction for dealing with large amounts of information. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. Before coming to Microsoft, he received his Ph.D. from the Computer Graphics and Animation Group at the MIT Media Lab in May 1994. He has demonstrated his work on stage with Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES); shipped software on the web for gathering and acting on information collected on the web; filed over 108 patents; and published papers on technologies as diverse as exploratory search, information visualization, multi-user environments, online social interaction, hypermedia research, human and robot perceptual capabilities, robot learning, parallel computer graphics, spectator oriented gaming, and human interfaces for camera control.
Jo Guldi
Abstract:
Representing Time, Representing Place. In the 1780s, the coming of the mail coach transformed the representation of the cityscape for travelers shuttled from place to place at unprecedented speeds. In the 1920s, land reform motivated the creation of participatory mapping. In the 2010s, the baseline technologies of the internet have created a new culture of shared maps. Where is the element of time in each of these representations? How do new forms of technology shift our understanding of where we are, as a creature in space and a creature of time? What stands to be revealed still, by a deeper reading of the places and times flowing around us?
Bio: Jo Guldi is a historian at the Harvard Society of Fellows whose interests range over the transition from pre-modern to modern societies. She specializes in the study of infrastructure, land use, and capitalism. Her first book, Roads to Power, tells the story of the infrastructure state and how strangers stopped speaking on the public street. Another project, the Spatial Humanities site, examines the “long spatial turn” that stamped the academic disciplines with a concern for landscape at the point of their formation, and offers suggestions about how digital media today are expanding our sense of spatial experience. She is currently working on a next project, Participation Restored, the story of the nineteenth-century global land reform movement and the rediscovery of participatory commons in land use, politics, and economics. Her blog, landscape.blogspot.com, documents some of her collaborations on big-data, visualization, and geo-parsing projects and the shared interests of digital researchers and the humanities.
Brad Stenger
Abstract:
Recycling Digital News: Journalism as Data, APIs as Platform. Since 2009, Katie Baker has been making scorecards out of The New York Times Sunday wedding announcements, first at Gawker.com, and now at Grantland.com. In them, important people and, oftentimes, their important parents, their prestigious universities, and their esteemed occupations are reduced to numbers. (Done respectfully, not mockingly, I must point out.) Those numbers manage to do what weddings also do: they compel us to look at how we got where we are, and where we might go from here. Using programming interfaces that access Times’ content, Baker’s scorecards have been automated in a web application. Not surprisingly, there is insight to uncover in the data. Interacting with the data, whether as Baker did using the printed paper or with a new digital interface, helps to uncover those insights and bring them to an audience, but while these interfaces enable, they also constrain. Such is the nature of platforms.
Bio: Brad Stenger became the first Developer Advocate hired at The New York Times in August, 2011. Previous work in research and in journalism includes projects for Wired, Barron’s, Stats, Inc., NASA, New Scientist, Ars Technica, Georgia Tech, Nike SPARQ, Oregon Health Sciences University, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Technology Review, the University of Washington, CUH2A Architects, and Yale University. Degrees include a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern, a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech and undergraduate degrees in English and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Rochester.
Sunah Suh
Abstract:
Visual artists that work in narrative genres such as children’s picture books and sequential comics draw on a sophisticated set of shared codes and symbols to convey the causal relationships that are crucial to narrative. Their techniques expect an audience that possesses a visual literacy, that is, knowledge of visual grammars, which enable readers to comprehend the intended meaning of their work. Likewise, creators of information visualization employ, consciously or not, shared symbols and conventions in a way that is often called “intuitive.” A closer examination, however, reveals that the visual language they employ to convey meaning does not arise out of a natural intuition at all but is, rather, a learned vocabulary embedded in a sociocultural context. Viewing information visualization from this perspective gives access to a variety of established methods in disparate fields such as visual semiotics, information literacy and narrative theory as analytic tools. In my presentation, I will survey some of these methods and demonstrate how they might be applied to information visualization.
Bio: Sunah is a fourth year PhD student at the University of Illinois’s iSchool, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Her research interests have included human-computer interaction, usability and, most recently, critical information studies. She has taught Entrepreneurial IT Design as a primary instructor and has been involved in teaching courses in Interfaces to Information Systems and Social Aspects of Information Technology in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and a Design Thinking Laboratory in the School of Art and Design. She has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and has held industry positions at Microsoft, Riverbed Technology and several tech start-ups.
Lance Weiler
Abstract: Coming soon.
Bio: Lance Weiler is a storyteller, entrepreneur and thought leader. Recognized as a pioneer because of the way he mixes storytelling and technology – WIRED magazine named him “One of twenty-five people helping to re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.”
Wesley Willett
Abstract:
Most visualizations designed for public consumption are highly curated – giving users little opportunity to build on them or participate in the process of knowledge generation. In this talk, I will prompt discussion on how we as visualization designers might build visualization tools for the web that better support sharing, conversation, and storytelling. For example, can we develop standards and best practices that make it easier for users to share, annotate, and build on datasets and visualizations using standard web tools? How can we collect and integrate the comments and observations that take place around visualizations on the heterogeneous web? Finally, can we provide tools that allow users to navigate, curate, and build stories that bring together the collective observations of many users?
Bio:
Wesley Willett is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Computer Science. He is part of the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD) and the Visualization Lab, where he is advised by Professor Maneesh Agrawala. Wes’s research interests span collaborative visual analysis, information visualization, new media, and human computer interaction.