VisWeek 2008

So that's it. I will write a bit more about my conclusions from this year's conference in a regular posting, but I think we have seen a clear shift towards more theory and more cognitive science in InfoVis this year. I expected to see a stronger focus on InfoVis for the masses, after last year's strong start. There were quite a few papers, but it hasn't become a major focus yet. That might still happen, though. I hope you enjoyed the live-blog, even if it was spotty at times. This has been an interesting experiment, and one I will definitely try again when there's a chance. Don't hold your breath though, there are no conferences coming up in the next few months.

David Laidlaw gave an interesting, thoughtful capstone talk comparing Vis and InfoVis 2008 to Vis 1998. He did a very extensive study, classifying the different contributions. While he had a lot of interesting observations about why numbers have changed, I felt that his analysis could have gone deeper. He ended with an interesting analogy of a stone wall and its construction, but I think he left quite a few people scratching their heads. Though maybe that's a good way to end the conference, so people keep thinking about it.

Next year's conference will be in Atlantic City, NJ. There will be a few changes: the conference will be earlier (Oct 11-16), the schedule changes so VAST and Tutorials will be at the beginning of the week, with InfoVis and Vis perfectly parallel Wednesday to Friday. Vis and InfoVis will also share keynote and capstone talks. This should be interesting, though I'm a bit concerned about how many people will end up attending the workshops and tutorials. Stay tuned for the capstone talk and wrap-up!

The last panel of the conference was on the interdisciplinary nature of visualization and visual analytics, in particular with regards to cognitive science. There is clearly a lot of interesting work that we need to connect to (and not just use what's there, but also inform further research). All this talk about science led to an interesting little side discussion I had with Jarke van Wijk on whether visual analytics should even be a science, or more an artistic or design field. I'm a bit undecided right now. both have their merits.

Danyel Fisher from Microsoft presented a paper on how they track narrative events as they unfold. I did not catch the entire presentation, but the examples he showed were quite interesting. The main criterion is to be able to see temporal sequence to tell what is causing what – given tens or hundreds of thousands of news stories, that can be rather challenging.

There hasn't been much activity here today because I've been trying to hunt down a particular dataset. This will be turned into a visualization posting here shortly, but it has kept me from paying much attention in the sessions, and I ended up skipping some of them altogether. Savikhin presented a neat little paper at VAST that looked into the effect of visualization (as opposed to simple data tables) in economic decision making - specifically to counter what's called the winner's curse (and there's also a loser's curse). They found that the visualization was much better than the tables. Not entirely unexpected, but good confirmation and a study that looked quite well-designed.

Now that's more like it! Anthony Robinson presented some very interesting results from a study he did on analysts working together on paper (with post-its, cut out images, etc.). His results provide a lot of insight into the analytical process, fairly regardless of background. What I found most interesting was that people who had changed or destroyed their own information layout when collaborating later regretted that because they could not go back to their own, complete results. Another presentation by Daniela Oelke on visualizing the precision of text classification and summarization algorithms was somewhat interesting, though their classification problems seemed rather trivial. Somebody then also made the comment that by applying this work to more state-of-the-art algorithms would also help to connect with the computational linguistics community.