While information is a crucial part of people's everyday lives, many people find that access to information via today's technologies is awkward, stressful, and overly intrusive in their lives. The problem is not with the information itself, but rather with its volume and the unwieldy ways currently provided for interacting with digital content. My research focus is to create interactive information visualizations so that they support people's everyday work and social practices as they interact with information. In this paper I will provide an eclectic overview of my research, particularly featuring the research done by my PhD students.Keywords: information visualization, observational studies. Index Terms: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]:User Interfaces -Interaction styles, Input devices and strategies. INTRODUCTIONI am amazed and deeply honoured to receive the Canadian Human-Computer Communication Society award. This is definitely a paper of thanks, and I have many people to thank -so many that it will not be possible to name them all here. For example, while academia is reportedly quite competitive, my experience has been that they have been welcoming and supportive. This has particularly included my home department, Computer Science at the University of Calgary, and the three nationwide research collectives I have been privileged to be a part of: NECTAR, GRAND, and Surfnet. It is also true of wonderful support and research exchange with SMART Technologiesparticularly Gerald Morrison, David Martin and Nancy Knowlton. However, even though these have been tremendously important, I would like to make this brief paper a celebration of those to whom I owe the most -my students.In the next section I will outline the research I have conducted with my research group -Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis). I will keep the words brief, and the images as plentiful as possible. In a paper of this length, I cannot possibly cover all the research we have conducted, nor mention all of my students. I have had to choose and have made eclectic selection. I have chosen some projects because they show our beginnings and others because they are more recent. Some projects were chosen because they represent what InnoVis is known for and others were chosen because they are less well known. Within this selection there is at least one project of all graduated PhD students. The students involved are featured with images and are named in captions. Post-doctoral fellows will be identified with PD and collaborators who are not my students will simply be listed as collaborators. INNOVIS RESEARCHMy research goal has always been to make information more accessible, more comprehensible, and more possible to make use of in our everyday lives. To this end, my research has encompassed new visual representations, and new explorations into interaction techniques. However, all of this has been grounded in careful, ethnographically-inspired observational studies. Since these studies have in many ways provided the foundations f...

Self-reflection is a central goal of personal informatics systems, and constructing visualizations from physical tokens has been found to help people reflect on data. However, so far, constructive physicalization has only been studied in lab environments with provided datasets. Our qualitative study investigates the construction of personal physicalizations in people's domestic environments over 2-4 weeks. It contributes an understanding of (1) the process of creating personal physicalizations, (2) the types of personal insights facilitated, (3) the integration of selfreflection in the physicalization process, and (4) its benefits and challenges for self-reflection. We found that in constructive personal physicalization, data collection, construction and self-reflections are deeply intertwined. This extends previous models of visualization creation and data-driven self-reflection. We outline how benefits such as reflection through manual construction, personalization, and presence in everyday life can be transferred to a wider set of digital and physical systems.

In this paper we discuss the creation of visual mementos as a new application area for visualization. We define visual mementos as visualizations of personally relevant data for the purpose of reminiscing, and sharing of life experiences. Today more people collect digital information about their life than ever before. The shift from physical to digital archives poses new challenges and opportunities for self-reflection and self-representation. Drawing on research on autobiographical memory and on the role of artifacts in reminiscing, we identified design challenges for visual mementos: mapping data to evoke familiarity, expressing subjectivity, and obscuring sensitive details for sharing. Visual mementos can make use of the known strengths of visualization in revealing patterns to show the familiar instead of the unexpected, and extend representational mappings beyond the objective to include the more subjective. To understand whether people's subjective views on their past can be reflected in a visual representation, we developed, deployed and studied a technology probe that exemplifies our concept of visual mementos. Our results show how reminiscing has been supported and reveal promising new directions for self-reflection and sharing through visual mementos of personal experiences.

Serendipity, a trigger of exciting yet unexpected discoveries, is an important but comparatively neglected factor in information seeking, research, and ideation. We suggest that serendipity can be facilitated through visualization. To explore this, we introduce the Bohemian Bookshelf, which aims to support serendipitous discoveries in the context of digital book collections. The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five interlinked visualizations each offering a unique overview of the collection. It aims at encouraging serendipity by (1) offering multiple visual access points to the collection, (2) highlighting adjacencies between books, (3) providing flexible visual pathways for exploring the collection, (4) enticing curiosity through abstract, metaphorical, and visually distinct representations of books, and (5) enabling a playful approach to information exploration. A deployment at a library revealed that visitors embraced this approach of utilizing visualization to support open-ended explorations and serendipitous discoveries. This encourages future explorations into promoting serendipity through information visualization.

Personal visualizations have the great potential to provide the benefits of visualizations to everyone in their everyday lives. Their diverse goals combined with the personal data they contain and the contexts in which they are being used, however, make their evaluation particularly challenging and call for a wider perspective on empirical approaches. We need to devise new methods and adapt existing methods from other fields to account for the specific goals and challenges in this emerging research area. An open-minded approach to empirical methods may help us gain a more realistic understanding of personal visualizations.

We explore visualization for personal storytelling and investigate techniques for communicating subjective experiences in personal visual narratives. Personal stories are often subjective and storytellers omit, invent, or embellish details to craft engaging stories or to communicate a perspective. As growing personal data collections allow individuals to leverage visualizations, we explore how personal visual narratives can express subjectivity. From an analysis of personal visualizations created by data enthusiasts, designers, and artists, we collect techniques for deliberately expressing subjectivity during data collection, processing, visual encoding, and presentation. Our results prompt a discussion about the role and potential of subjectivity in personal visual storytelling.

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