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Inside IEEEVIS 2025: Key Themes, Best Papers, and the Future of Visualization
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In this episode, I sit down with Alvitta Ottley and Paul Parsons to recap everything that happened at the 2025 IEEE VIS Conference in Vienna. We talk about our experiences co-organizing the VisCom workshop, the surprising attendance, and the standout keynote from Moritz Stefaner. Alvitta shares insights on accessibility research and the surge of LLM-focused visualization papers, while Paul walks us through his award-winning work on design cognition and how practitioners develop ideas. We also reflect on the evolving identity of the visualization field, from methodological rigor to the role of practitioners, interdisciplinarity, and ethical tensions. It’s a wide-ranging, candid conversation about where visualization research is headed — and what we hope to see next year in Boston.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fall Conferences
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Biz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. We are nearing the end of the year and November is fall conference time. And so I've been traveling a lot, but the first conference in my little tour of November was the Biz Conference. this year in Vienna, Austria. I was one of the co-organizers of the VizCom workshop, which is visualization for communication, trying to bring together researchers, academics, and practitioners.
00:00:40
Speaker
And so I wanted to do a quick recap of the conference. Now I couldn't be there the whole time. i had to get back home for other things.
Key Topics in Viz Conference
00:00:48
Speaker
So I invited my co-organizers of VizCom Paul Parsons from Purdue University and Alveda Atli from Washington University in St. Louis to join me on the show to talk about the conference. We talked about workshops. We talked about sessions that they liked, primarily that they liked. We talked obviously about AI because everybody was talking about AI. And we talked about kind of the structure of the conferences as a whole and and also
00:01:13
Speaker
In this conversation, we talked a bit about sort of the nature of the field and some conversations that were taking place both from kind of the main stage as it were from some of the keynotes and the capstone, but also amongst attendees and what is the nature of the data visualization research field and where is it now and where is it going and how's it gonna grow and evolve and change. So um you're gonna hear kind of a long but interesting, I think conversation about this year's Viz conference. And of course, if you are interested in participating The deadline for papers comes up, I believe, in around March of 2026. Next year's conference will be in Boston. I will try to be there. If you would like to be involved in the VizCom organizing committee, please reach out. Would love to have you. We're trying to expand the reach, trying to change up some of the organizing committee. as you'll hear us talk a little bit about that at the end of this interview. So let's get over
Research Interests of Guests
00:02:04
Speaker
to it. This is my conversation with Paul Parsons and Alveda Atli about the 2025's VIZ conference in Vienna, Austria.
00:02:17
Speaker
Alveda, Paul, good to see you again. It's been a few weeks only. How are you? Very good. Pretty good. Thanks for inviting me. Well, you know, I think we did with Robert Casar a few years ago, we did a vis recap. So I felt like you were the natural bridge to the next one years, years later.
00:02:35
Speaker
Okay. So just for folks who who don't know let's do quick introductions. Uh, Elvita and then Paul Elvita, what's your, yeah. Whatever you want to say about yourself. Hi everyone. My name is Elvita Otley and i am an associate professor of computer science at Washington university in St. Louis. Wow. That's a lot.
00:02:54
Speaker
Uh, My work specializes in data visualization. Particularly, i'm interested in designing for everyday people. I'm interested in visualization literacy and interested in complex situations where perhaps a human can't go through all of the data space. So thinking about how do you embed AI into those contexts to support decision making and just processing the data. Okay.
00:03:25
Speaker
Paul, over to you. PAUL All right. Hi, I'm Paul Parsons. I am an associate professor at Purdue University. And my research is in design practice, design cognition. And as it pertains to Viz, I've been studying how data Viz practitioners work, what their processes look like, and how they think, how they come up with ideas.
00:03:50
Speaker
um And that's the design cognition piece of it. um In terms of viz, I don't know how many times I've been, but I've been going ah off and on for at least more than a decade, 10 to 15 years somewhere by now.
00:04:07
Speaker
Which is strange because you're only like, what, 27, 26? Yeah, Yeah, Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, it's crazy. Yeah. OK. ah All right. So Viz 2025, one of what? One of like the three premier visualization InfoViz conferences. Pretty much that kind of sound right? OK. On the academic side.
00:04:31
Speaker
um ah this year's was held in Vienna. I'm just trying to give folks like lay of the land. So this year is held in Vienna, Austria. Next year we'll be in Boston, Massachusetts in the
Structure and Engagement at Viz Conference
00:04:42
Speaker
States. um And at least as far as I have been going, which is not as frequently as you, Paul, because I'm only 18. So, you know, I don't have much, much time. um ah It's, it's traditionally right. Then two, the first two days are these kind of workshops that tend to be more,
00:05:01
Speaker
testing things a little bit more, maybe practitioner focus, a little bit more, maybe actionable or not actionable, in like a less actionable in like a research sense, more like hands-on sort of like exploring different processes and experiments and stuff like that. And then the next, what, four or five days depending is kind of your, your more typical traditional academic conference with concurrent sessions and keynotes and there's a best paper and there's a big dinner and all that. That sound about right?
00:05:31
Speaker
you yes Yeah. OK, so this year we have two days of workshops. Let's start there. um Why don't we talk about ours first? So so the three of us co-organized the Vizcom workshop, which is trying to get at sort of bringing together practitioners and um and the and the academics and the researchers. um Alveda got there late because you reflect problems. So we'll come back to you because you kind of swooped in at the end to take all the credit. No, I'm just kidding. you know You did keep us on track. I will say that. will say that. Okay. So um Paul, what, like, what did you think? I mean, we spent a lot of time pulling this all together. Like what what were your impressions as it, as it showed up that day?
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um overall I, I think I was pretty happy with how things went. We had a pretty full room, I'd say, for the whole time, I think, even post-coffee break.
00:06:23
Speaker
I think at one point I counted somewhere around 100-ish, give or take 10 or so. so it was pretty good attendance. The talks were were all good. The keynote was fantastic. I'm sure we'll come back to that.
00:06:38
Speaker
But even from just the administration side, everything was smooth. People kept the time. And I think there was good audience engagement. So I think that's really what we want. you know Yeah. Yeah. I think we checked those boxes pretty well. Yeah.
00:06:54
Speaker
I mean, I was I was shocked that people stayed on time. I mean, that was the part that rarely happens, but it rarely. Yeah. Um, let's start at the end and then come back to the, to the keynote. Elvira, you, you kind of came in like, I think kind of halfway through like straight from the airport. So pretty tired. Like, how did you, what was your sense of the room when you walked in sort of like halfway through this whole, I mean, half day session? It's pretty long.
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah. I, I mean, I was pleasantly surprised. i didn't, I actually don't know what I expected in terms of, uh, attendance. It's really hard to predict because the Viz conference, they have several workshops going on at the same time. So there might've been seven or so, six or seven yeah yeah concurrent sessions. And so I was really glad to see that it was well attended and the audience, they were asking lots of questions. So it's as good as it can be. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah.
Keynotes and Workshops Highlights
00:07:57
Speaker
um So let's go back to the keynote was from Moritz Stefaner, who we kind of gave free reign to, to kind of like, I think we we reached out to him originally because he had done some work with the world health organization on their design system, but we kind of gave him free reign. don't know, Paul, do you want to maybe just your reactions to his, to his talk?
00:08:16
Speaker
Well, sure. I mean, I, I enjoyed it. I thought it was a, In terms of the delivery, it was it was good, of course, and engaging.
00:08:29
Speaker
but I think also he was he was addressing some issues that I think are quite relevant at the intersection of researcher practitioner kind of dialogues.
00:08:40
Speaker
um And yeah, just really talking about his, i think his process and some of the things that he thinks about when he's working on these um sometimes pretty complicated projects.
00:08:52
Speaker
I think, yeah, it was it was just a really nice overview. He had some sort of slides that pulled together quite a few ideas, including AI, you know, AI's role in in design. um And yeah, I think the the reception was quite good. I heard a lot of people talking about it. There were questions in the room and I heard people talking in the hallways.
00:09:16
Speaker
So yeah, I think it was it was quite successful. Yeah, no, I agree. And I think he did a really nice job of doing what we hoped he would do, which is talk about his kind of practice and also kind of lead the researchers in the room to see like, what do we still need evidence for when it comes to effectively communicating, you know, data or dashboards or design practices.
00:09:41
Speaker
um And he is just kind of like, he's got that, That kind of casual speaking emotion thing that I think people just kind of naturally kind of connect with. So I thought it was like really well, well received. um Okay. So that's VisCom. Obviously full throated success. It will have to be repeated every year with, you know, full funding from the organizers. Okay. Do you have another workshop that you attended Sunday or Monday that you want to, want to mention?
00:10:11
Speaker
I didn't do that in workshop. So pump you didn't go to any other ones. No. I mean, I got there late for VSCOM. Right. And the other workshops that i were interested that I was interested in were all on Sunday. Oh, man.
00:10:28
Speaker
i just had lots of meetings on Monday. Paul, do you say he didn't see anything else? I know like the big one that everybody went to is the Gen AI one. I did not go to that. i went to Alt-Viz on Sunday morning. I had a paper and and then of course I was there. I didn't go to any on Monday because I was just hit so hard with the jet lag and I needed that day to recover. I went to Alt-Viz, which is kind of like the fun...
00:11:00
Speaker
crazy viz short paper one which was which is kind of fun lighthearted the one that i spent all day the second day was at um input viz um which i enjoyed except that i kind of felt like we spent a lot of time on like a specific project which i think was really helpful for the person whose project it was but for everybody else in the room i think it just kind of bogged down but The latter half of that day was great. It was a lot of like, what is the future of this part of the field? What needs to be explored? What research needs to happen? So I really enjoyed that part and sort of like a actionable, like here's a Google like signup sheet. If you want to be a part of like a paper or if you want to try some experiments, like sign up on all these different areas. so I thought that was, that was really great. Okay. What's not just what's the gist of an input viz? I don't know if the listeners will know. Yeah, that's that's ah that's a good point. So I attended and I presented a paper on the data physicalization stuff that I've been doing. So someone you know puts a post-it note on a board puts a thing on a hoop or whatever it is.
00:12:02
Speaker
Input Viz is a little bit more general than that in what a user does or gets when they do something into visualization. So when they, you know, the sort of, you know, the You Draw It series from the New York Times came up a couple of times where there's like a line chart and it stops and then you as the user draw what you think the trend looks like. Or the other big one that showed up was... um ah this is an old one from the New York times did this like scatter plot of your feelings when Osama bin Laden was killed. And the New York times had this thing where you could put a dot on, I don't remember what the two axes are, but your feeling and whatever it was pride or something like that. And you could, you know, write your emotion on there. um And so those sorts of things. And, you know, I think a lot of it, a lot of people in the room were doing stuff like wearable technology, which obviously is, is sort of a big part of this. Um,
00:12:54
Speaker
You know, there wasn't a ton of focus on like your kind of standard dashboarding, um which I think is kind of more in the practitioner space, but it had some of these other kind of more experimental um pieces. And obviously I was focusing on the physical part, but there are lots of people doing lots of kind of neat stuff. So Um, that was fun.
00:13:12
Speaker
Um, okay. Um, but then I left, um, I took the day off on Tuesday to explore Vienna, which, uh, was super great. Um, and then did hit of course the party in the nighttime, but, but during the day I took off. all right. So, um, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, was there a Friday as well?
00:13:30
Speaker
one right Oh man. Okay. So what did you like most or, you know, what, what caught your attention? I don't know. I don't know if you want to start. Sure.
Innovative Research Papers
00:13:41
Speaker
On Tuesday, so that's when there's scientific portion, the real papers, the real portion where you have paper presentations start. And i for the first time, was very excited about the best papers.
00:13:56
Speaker
So one of the best papers is one by Paul, and he can talk about it later. But I also really liked one that looked at data visualization for blind and visually impaired folks. So what they did was they had Braille paper and they printed visualizations on Braille paper. And ultimately, the main research goal they had was to ask, if you print these out and have people answer questions, will we see similar accuracy levels as
00:14:32
Speaker
when you have a sighted person looking at a a display, a visualization on a display. So they found that their results are comparable, which means that printing out visualizations on Braille paper could be a good way of communicating data for people who are visually impaired.
00:14:53
Speaker
And it was low tech. So I really liked that work. And in their paper, they had lots of just like qualitative feedback where their participants talked about how they feel left out from the world of visualization. So I do think that thinking about the limitations of visualizations who are left out and who are included, it's just, it was a really great way to kick off the conference and really great way for us to start thinking about accessibility.
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. um Paul, do you want to talk about your your work? All right, yeah. So um I had a best paper in the first best paper session.
00:15:41
Speaker
yeah so the the paper is about data viz practitioners and how they how they do their work. And this is coming from a ah year multi-year project that I've been doing along with one of my PhD students, Prakash.
00:15:56
Speaker
And we had a pretty robust sort of data collection that we did across design challenge and then diary entries and interviews. And what we were interested in was how designers were understanding what the nature of the problem is that they were solving and then how they went from that to then actually generating solutions. And i think there's ah there's a sort of assumption in the literature, if you look at the the the models and the
00:16:30
Speaker
the frameworks that exist about design. there's ah There's an assumption that things happen somewhere in ah in a stepwise fashion, even though, of course, there's iteration.
00:16:41
Speaker
But what I mean is that we first sort of understand the nature of the problem, which includes things like understanding the data, you know the data types, sort of the the nature of the data, characterizing the domain, so understanding something about the nature of how people are working in this space,
00:16:59
Speaker
um understanding what tasks need to be done. so we might talk about that in terms of like task abstractions or task typologies and things. And then once we have a sense of that, then we can start moving on to the solution. So then we like, you know, we're picking chart types, we're thinking about encodings and interacting and so on.
00:17:19
Speaker
And what we're what're what I'm arguing in the paper, what we're what we're finding in the data is that it's not really happening quite like that. um Instead, what we're seeing is that there's a what we're calling, we're borrowing this term from the design theory literature, co-evolving problem and solution spaces. So people are simultaneously figuring out what the real nature of the problem is that they're addressing and generating solutions. And they're they're going back and forth. And so they might be moving into the solution space.
00:17:51
Speaker
and using that as a way to probe their their understanding of what the problem is that they're working on, and they're sort of going back and forth. and So that's that's the gist of what we're arguing, but there's there's a bit more of a, I think, sort of a critique in some way of some of the philosophical kind of assumptions that are common in in the literature, um but also I think sort of an an extension of some of the models that exist there. There's a bit more of a,
00:18:20
Speaker
contribution of sort of ah underlying mechanisms of what's going on when designers are thinking about how they do what they do. So yeah, that's sort of the gist of it.
00:18:32
Speaker
Now, do you get to wear a medal the rest of the week? Like a... No, no, no, nothing that ah extravagant. I mean, it is, it's interesting to me a little bit. Like I've just, in the social science conference that I've gone to, I've never seen a bet. like They don't have like a best paper. They have, they'll sometimes do like poster contests, which,
00:18:53
Speaker
I've actually only judged one. And so I don't know, like most time if it's content or design related, like how they're judged, but it tends to be mostly grad students anyways. So, you know, I think that's a good, good part of it. But um the best paper thing always sort of strikes me as a ah strange competition within this academic thing, but. i is Yeah. Okay. so we've talked about really two, two of the kind of, we'll call them best papers since that's what they were, they were deemed. um What else did you see?
00:19:22
Speaker
that you really liked. Alveda, were there other papers that you saw? Yes.
Role of LLMs in Visualization
00:19:26
Speaker
So, of course, there were several papers on LLMs and GPT. And yeah yeah I did really like some of them. I could tell that the field will be saturated in the next coming years.
00:19:41
Speaker
But some of the ones that immediately come to mind was one paper by Nicholas Dunquist and his group. And we're looking at using LLMs to automate the design automate design feedback. So given designers feedback on their visualizations uses using LLMs.
00:20:03
Speaker
i I definitely love that. That is something that we're working on in our lab, but you're doing it a different way. So that stood out. There was another one by Namook Kim and his group, and they were also looking at visualization advice.
00:20:19
Speaker
And they were comparing GPT to human advice. They got that human advice from the VizGuys, their website. So VizGuys, for those who don't know, it is a website where you can get feedback on your visualization design from other practitioners.
00:20:38
Speaker
And what they did is that they got that feedback and they compared that feedback to some of the LLM's feedback. They found that LLMs gave very similar ones and similar in terms of just the the style, the length, and the knowledge that is embedded.
00:20:56
Speaker
They found that humans, though, when they were giving feedback, they were more likely to use references or give some theoretical grounding, and that is something that LLMs missed.
00:21:08
Speaker
So I do like this idea of using LLMs to help critique visualizations. I have some Overall concerns with that, because it's really hard to validate that.
00:21:21
Speaker
And then the final one was again about LLMs and i liked it for surprisingly not what the authors intended. So with this one, they were trying to see if visualizations can help LLMs understand data.
00:21:38
Speaker
So they gave LLMs information in a table format. And they gave LLMs information and typically is' a scatterplot. the task that they had was ask if there's anything noteworthy or any trends LLMs should identify if there is anything, any patterns there.
00:21:59
Speaker
What they found is that visualizations did help. So LLMs were significantly better at identifying trends, patterns, and so forth. if they were given data visualization versus if they were given a table.
00:22:14
Speaker
ah And to me, that's not very surprising. ah And it would be the same for humans as well, because one of if you give someone a table and ask them to see patterns, yes, LLMs could in theory try to visualize it or run machine learning.
00:22:34
Speaker
But yeah the issue that I had with this study is that you had already selected the visualization, which is a task in and of itself. How do you play this? yeah So the authors already decided that a scatterplot is the best way to see these patterns. And so that is just a step further.
00:22:53
Speaker
But yeah I really liked it though, because it starts, I think there is a possibility to use GPT to understand the affordances of different visualization designs.
00:23:06
Speaker
And so given... X different visualizations and you ask LLMs, do you see any patterns and so forth? I think it would be a really cool way to test what is the first thing people tend to see, even though LLMs are not people. And there are issues about yeah using it as proxies for people.
00:23:26
Speaker
But I do see so that there are some interesting questions that we can start asking with LLMs at scale and then validate it with humans. Yeah, I guess I am a little surprised, on that finding because it would seem to me that if you fed a table into an LLM, it would be able to do the statistical analysis, which, which we know is insufficient, but to at least get a sense of patterns. But which, did what but which statistics to run.
00:23:56
Speaker
so that is a thing, like, even though there are a variety of statistical analysis they could run. one of the hard part of that problem is figuring out which one to run.
00:24:07
Speaker
And i imagine that LLMs have limitations on how many calls it can make. And so it might choose one and that one might not have been the ah the ideal one.
00:24:19
Speaker
Right. I'm curious because I saw so much, at least on the program of of LLMs. And um I wonder whether you think uh it's too early to do some of this work or if this is or it's it this is you know it's just kind of at the ground floor and this is when work should get started but like whether you think the exponential curve in how they work and their learning is going to change everything you just saw couple weeks ago does that make sense yes and the question the answer to that is yes and no ah it is okay It is too early and i particularly don't, I'm not working too much in this space for exactly what you said. we had a project yeah a few months ago that was that was presented at Eurovis and we were comparing different LLMs to figure out which one is best at visualization tasks.
00:25:17
Speaker
ah At that time, Claude was best, but now We did it with GPT-4O and now there's GPT-5-1. And so that yeah results already is obsolete.
00:25:29
Speaker
And so it is, I think it's early, but I do see that it could still be beneficial. What I mean by that is we have a benchmark now of what older LLMs were doing. And now we can update that with the new LLMs. Now you have pipeline to easily test them.
00:25:51
Speaker
So I do think that's a plus. I agree that some of the tools that we have right now are not as good as it could be. But having that infrastructure and having people go through that thought process, I think is going to make it easier for us to develop better things in the future.
00:26:10
Speaker
Right. Right. um Okay. ah Paul, um other things that you saw that you liked? Yeah, maybe I'll... um I'm guessing you saw a lot of AI LLM stuff too.
00:26:22
Speaker
Oh yeah. I mean, it's impossible not to. Yeah. Yeah. art It's hard not to see those. But maybe I'll, maybe I'll shift the conversation a little bit to the keynote, the the keynote, which was on Tuesday and then the capstone, which was on Friday.
00:26:40
Speaker
um And I i really liked them. um So who who did who did both? just so Okay, yeah, the keynote was from Hans Christian Hager.
00:26:54
Speaker
um and yeah And the title was the science of visual insight, transforming data visualization into a rigorous discipline. um I liked it. i wouldn't have I wouldn't have done the same talk, but whatever. That's everyone's prerogative, right?
00:27:12
Speaker
But what I thought was interesting was that it was, I think it sort of signals, a in a way, maybe signals a kind of maturity of the discipline because it was really sort of almost meta-theoretical and in some ways and was asking, like, what makes this a rigorous field?
00:27:29
Speaker
And what does it mean to be scientific? And there was a whole like discussion during the middle of the keynote about the nature of truth, which of course is a you know unanswerable sort of universally. But um the the speaker was sort of describing his foray you know into the various philosophies of truth and what it means and how it was a lot more complicated than he thought you know that it should be. And of course, people have been writing about these things since the beginning of time.
00:28:02
Speaker
um And so, you know, the like the conclusion was that we need to... Well, I don't know if I'm characterizing correctly, but that we need to sort of make...
00:28:13
Speaker
this notion of insight and the the field of data visualization more rigorous by considering what we mean by truth and recognizing that there are a variety of factors, then a variety of ways of seeing truth. And so personally, I wouldn't have you know i wouldn't have done it that way. But i think it was I think it raised a lot of questions. People were talking about it afterwards. um it's sort of like raised questions about core sort of like central things about rigor methodology and like the scientific nature of the field so yeah i um i enjoyed that uh you know from that perspective it wasn't just like let me tell you about some visualizations i've made yeah right um so it's much more philosophical and inward looking kind of
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, i I obviously didn't get to see that, but but I have been struck as someone kind of on the outside of this field, attending this for, you know, for occasionally for a while now and seeing some papers that come out with like,
00:29:19
Speaker
you know, we tested this thing for six people and here's the point estimate and here's the standard error. And I'm like, six people, like your the standard error is plus or minus infinity. And so it does, oftentimes when I read these papers, I feel like the field sometimes isn't sure, like, is it a field of psychology? Is it a field of statistics and computer science? And what's the blending of the two? So I appreciate the sort of,
00:29:49
Speaker
like I think as you said, Paul, like the evolution of the field and so what at its core sort of is the is the science is an interesting question for sure. Yeah, I think he was, kind at least what I took away was he was kind of saying, you know, we need to move beyond this like field as a collection or like a toolbox of techniques in like a CS technical kind of way and really ask ourselves questions about like the philosophical foundations of the field sort of.
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah. So that's the part I like, yeah. um Okay,
Globalization and Ethics in Visualization
00:30:20
Speaker
and the capstone? I don't even know who did the capstone. Yeah, the capstone was... I'm having to look these up because I forgot. Theo Dudinger, I think. i'm you know probably not saying them right right, but a diagrammatic approach to the world. And I really like this one. This one was quite different from the capstone, but shared some flavors, I think, that were similar.
00:30:42
Speaker
And so he's, ah if I understand correctly, an architect by by training, maybe. but does a lot of like really sort of graphic design, infographics kind of work. And what he was doing was looking back, I i don't know if it was like over the past 100 years or something, and using diagrams to communicate changes in our world, essentially. And I think he was exploring themes of globalization,
00:31:14
Speaker
migration and borders and sort of power dynamics in terms of like globalization in the world. And so there were a lot of really interesting diagrams or like visualizations that he showed that that were, i mean, they're really like bringing in a critical theoretical sort of angle, I think, really questioning the power dynamics and why we why are we keep people in or out of certain borders and and so on, looking at trends and globalization and what's that what that's doing to the environment. So these types of questions, but really told through the story of a really wide variety of visuals. yeah
00:31:56
Speaker
So it was really it was really interesting. Yeah. And it sounds like a good way to end it, right? With a sort of look back to look forward kind of thing. Um, so obviously we could talk about all sorts of papers, but, uh, let me just ask sort of like overarching. So like, what did you like most? And that could be either like the organization itself, the location, the papers, but like, was there something that you liked the most?
00:32:19
Speaker
Alveda, maybe we start with you. i don't know if there's something liked the most beyond just meeting people, because for me, visualization, these conferences is the one time where we all get together.
00:32:33
Speaker
But if If I were to really be critical about it, i i remember there was this one panel that really touched on something that was intriguing.
00:32:46
Speaker
It was a panel run by Lynn Harrison, Mariah Meyer, Arvind, and some other folks. and it was a follow-up from ah a workshop that they had this summer.
00:32:59
Speaker
I guess it doesn't really matter what it was about. But a part of this was a conversation about ethics and visualization and really thinking about, are there times when it's sometimes okay to reinforce biases and stereotypes in visualization design?
00:33:19
Speaker
And off the top of your head, you would say, no, why would you do that? or Particularly you, John, I know that you've been thinking about this for a while, but their scenario that someone brought up is,
00:33:31
Speaker
you are a doctor and you are trying to communicate something to like an older man you know ahead of time that they are accustomed to seeing pink and blue.
00:33:44
Speaker
That is their world model and perhaps, you know, if you show them pink or blue, studies would suggest that it would be easier for them to understand. now should you and blue?
00:33:58
Speaker
color pink and blue Or should you color it based on a more neutral color or try not to reinforce these stereotypes? And i do think that it's ah it's something that gives you pause. And I think it's really philosophical question to ask.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think oftentimes a lot of these conversations lose the specific context or the specific audience.
00:34:30
Speaker
And in a healthcare care setting, you might do things that you wouldn't do sort of publicly out in the world, but you're dealing with a patient and, you know, you know, you need, maybe you need to do things or say things or show things that, you know, um, that, you know, in a more, in a different context, like in the, in the news or something you would, or in academic paper, you might not do, but yeah, that's a, that is an interesting, interesting topic. Um,
00:34:58
Speaker
Paul, anything, any other like big reactions, feedback, things you like the most? I guess you could say the least if you want to be the negative guy, but you already won your medal. So don't think you want to appreciate it. I don't want say it. No.
00:35:14
Speaker
Yeah. I think in terms of like a big picture view um and perhaps I'm, you know, I'm seeing this from my own perspective, of course, but I think there's a, I got the feeling that there's sort of a,
00:35:28
Speaker
maturation kind of going on in the field. you know And we just talked about the keynote and the capstone. I think those were kind of indicative of that going on. But just I'm seeing a bit more maybe both interdisciplinarity in some of the conversations going on, but also sort of inward reflection too about like, what are what is our theory telling us and where are we going as a field and what makes this a coherent field.
00:35:57
Speaker
And I think that's more palatable to people. Those kinds of conversations are maybe more in people's minds nowadays. Like I said, maybe I'm just projecting that, but I sort of got that sense. So I enjoyed that. I thought that's a good sense. don't want to be too much of a doubter, but I do, there's, there's a movie like quote echo in the back of my head. That's like, you know, when you come to the end, you always go back and look at the beginning. So, you know, I don't know if, I mean, that may be too dark, but yeah.
00:36:25
Speaker
you know i mean, there I certainly had a lot of conversations with people about funding challenges, about a lot of graduate students worried about their immigration status and where they could or could not get jobs or postdocs. So, I mean, i know I know I had a lot of those conversations.
00:36:42
Speaker
I do have a least favorite thing though. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's let's go. are we going to throw under the bus? Now I think about it. One that is not, hopefully is not too controversial.
Future Directions and Challenges
00:36:53
Speaker
But I agree with Paul that I see the field and even the conference maturing. So we even just had a revise where this is a committee that comes together to think about how to improve the practices for the conference itself.
00:37:10
Speaker
But over the years, what i've what I've seen is that even though we have a lot of workshops still, the types of workshops are different. So in the past, there were several workshops that bring in practitioners. I can think of the LDAP workshop, of course, the VisCom workshop, and i see less of that now.
00:37:32
Speaker
And it is somewhat intentional and I guess also unintentional. I agree that funding and just travel restrictions make it difficult for people to attend, but there are also some treasurer some structural changes that this itself is making. They are intentionally trying to cut down on the number of workshops and that's even going to be worse next year. So workshop might be one day instead of two days.
00:38:00
Speaker
i I understand the notion of that, but at the same time, i think it's worthwhile to think about how to do it in a controlled fashion so that We don't exclude all of the workshops that would bring in new ideas and fresh faces.
00:38:20
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I have some thoughts on that too, but I'll, Paul, umm I'm sure you talked to folks about plans for Boston, but like, yeah. What did you see? What'd you hear? What are your thoughts on the kind of theme that Alveda touched on?
00:38:32
Speaker
Um, Well, yeah so I have heard this the same thing, that the workshops are probably going down to one day. i don't know all the reasoning behind it, so I don't really have an informed opinion. Yeah. I mean, one critique I do have of the workshops is that they're not really workshops. Yeah. you know They're just like mini sessions. So.
00:38:55
Speaker
Take that for you know whatever, however you will. But I imagine there are probably ways that we could have more kind of hands-on things, like more open forum discussions and bring in other voices. Because it's hard to do that in, unless you have a paper, you're not really doing that in the workshops anyway.
00:39:15
Speaker
yeah So it's not really like an open forum for shared discussion. it's just, let me present another paper. So I think i you know I might add that on, but that's like that's a bigger structural change than just like cutting down maybe. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. It does feel, at least the ones that I attended, felt like, i mean, even VisCom is a series of papers essentially, right? It's not like we didn't have a panel discussion of two academics and two practitioners sort of batting ideas around. i mean, I think the input vis They were basically lightning talks, and there was a lot of people, so the lightning talks talks took a long time, but the rest of the day was like, you're working in groups and doing things. I mean, ah and i I personally coming from the practitioner side, i struggle with this a little bit, because on the one hand, I do want to see more interdisciplinary issues.
00:40:06
Speaker
work collaboration going on between the academics and the practitioners. But on the other hand, um it is an academic conference. At least that's sort of like what it has been to to date. Maybe that's not the right way, but like it's an academic conference. So this is a place where people go to share their their research. But kind of point to your point, um Paul, about the about the keynote, like what is the practice? What is the science of it? And how much does you know how much can practitioners sort of lend their experience to it. I would also say just from the practitioner side, you know, thinking of just like a freelancer totally on their own, it's a very expensive conference to, to attend. I mean, the, the, I don't know the prices off top my head. I mean, I only went for two days and it was, it was pretty expensive. Yeah.
00:40:54
Speaker
Yeah. yeah It's prohibitive for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah, right. And plus, you know, you have the travel, even if you lived in, in this case, in, even if you lived in Austria, and you know, you got to pay for the, for, you know, all the travel. So it's not a cheap conference, but I have heard the same thing. They're going to cut down the the workshops to one day and maybe even cut a day off at the end with fewer papers of that half. I guess it's a half day is the last day. yeah half So maybe cut that.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah. um I mean, it's a, it's a long conference for sure. um But I always have a good time. I like always like to see the the papers, Um, and I had a bit of hesitation on some of these AI papers. Cause I'm like, I don't know if we're like there yet, but, um, I'm not doing the work. So, you know, easy for me to criticize.
00:41:39
Speaker
Okay. So I guess last question is um For you two, um what are you working on now if you want to share? And like the the the deadline for Viz26 comes up in like three months or something like that, maybe four months, like it's in March, I think, something like that. Yeah. So um what are you working on now and what are you hoping to pull together that you can submit? If you if you have topics top of mind that you want to share.
00:42:08
Speaker
don't know, Paul, you're you're nodding, so maybe you can go first. ah yeah I was just nodding in agreement. Like, yeah, that's a good question. And you've got big boot you got big shoes to fill. You got to follow up ah best paper. I know. It's only downhill from here. Maybe I should retire. um Well, so yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, I'm continuing with the similar theme. I've still got quite a lot of data from that study, which was a kind of a massive undertaking, just getting that off the ground.
00:42:39
Speaker
So something coming out of that, perhaps I don't have anything concrete, but I'm also running another study. where I'm um in the process of planning it where I'm essentially doing the same thing.
00:42:51
Speaker
But the the previous one was with with expert practitioners and the next one is going to be with novices. And then I'm going to I'm going to run the same study and then try to figure out how things are different. And yeah, you know, novices and experts are thinking. Nice. Whether that will get done in time for Viz, I don't know. But I'll probably try to pull a few things together. So that's kind of where I'm where i'm thinking.
00:43:16
Speaker
Nice. Alvita, what do you have on your ah on your plate? That's a hard question because I'm trying to think about what I can actually talk about. So there are papers right now that are CHI you know they want it to be anonymous. so i i can't talk about those.
00:43:33
Speaker
And there are ideas that are too junior for me to talk about as well. ah ah Okay, so there are some things that might be that sweet spot. So one of the projects we've been working on is extending the data visualization literacy test.
00:43:48
Speaker
So a few years ago in our lab, we created the mini VLAT, which is three-minute way of testing your data visualization literacy. Rightly so, there are people who have seen this and identify shortcomings.
00:44:06
Speaker
It was not meant to be a practical thing. It was more of a research contribution. But it's clear to me that there are people around the world who would love to have tests like this that they can use.
00:44:17
Speaker
And so one of the things that we've been doing, I've had a student who have been creating tests for almost every country. There are some countries that it's really difficult to find data. But our idea is to have a test where the data sets that we use are going to be customized for that country.
00:44:38
Speaker
And of course, translating it into different language. As you can tell, this is a huge undertaking. We've had some, we're done with Ghana where we've had testing and had, ah well, we were focused on students, but there were students in Ghana. We had 700 people who took this test. So essentially what I'm doing is We're creating these data data visualization literacy tests. And the idea is to kind of get an understanding of whether or not people understand visualization around the world in a way that is comparable.
00:45:11
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I mean, it'll be, I mean, I've always been fascinated with um in particular newspapers and in Asian cultures that are way more data dense than we see here in the United States.
00:45:24
Speaker
um And so I would be curious to see how, you know, I mean, I think there's like there's that question on its own, but whether that sort of culture society impact people's data viz literacy. So I think that'd be, that would be fascinating. sure it's the case. And there are other countries where If you look at their newspapers, there are no visualizations at all.
00:45:43
Speaker
So I do think, especially as the world is getting global and we're thinking about sharing data around the world, just understanding what you can use where and maybe customize it for different cultures and different countries.
00:45:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's great chatting with you both. I think our last call, right, is to see any listeners want to be involved in Vizcom organizing, right? I think Alvita, you really want to cycle off, right? I do, but I think it's more so that I want to make space for other people who want to come. And I think it's good to have fresh ideas. And a part of the problem is us standing in the way and not giving opportunities to new people. So It's there and I'm willing to help out in any way I can.
00:46:28
Speaker
All right. So you all heard it. That's the call to be involved in BizComm. There's the tighter competition. So we're going to need some help. Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on the show. Lots of great stuff. I'll put links to all the papers in the show notes. Folks should check them out.
00:46:43
Speaker
And you can go email Elvita and Hall. Y'all have about the things you you heard. Thanks, both for coming on the show. It's always a lot of fun to talk to you Thanks, John.
00:46:53
Speaker
Thanks, John. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. Hope you enjoyed that. I hope you'll check out some of those papers. I haven't read all of them. Obviously, there's a lot of great stuff i need to go read and learn and take a look at. um i hope you'll do the same. I've put some of the links in the show notes. And I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I hope you're enjoying the show. few episodes before the end of the year.
00:47:14
Speaker
Hope you'll take a listen. So until next time, this has been the Policy of His Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.