Constructive visualization

Abstract

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...

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“…On the opposite end of the spectrum we have tools that support a bottom-up approach to visualization construction such as those implementing constructive visualization principles [22,23,24,25]. In bottom-up tools people explicitly establish mappings between individual data points and the graphical elements that represent them.…”

The Explanatory Visualization Framework: An Active Learning Framework for Teaching Creative Computing Using Explanatory Visualizations

“…Token and constructive based tasks using physical objects [26] are useful for understanding concepts, but are less suitable for our purpose of creating graphical exploratory visualizations. Wireframe drawing software could be used, but again it is far more difficult to structure the design process, explore design alternatives and students can get distracted by getting to grips with the software rather than generating alternative design ideas.…”

“…A part of this learning journey is well resourced. There are many strategies that can be used in class to help teach concepts, ranging from sketches on the board and diagrams shown sequentially in a presentation, to videos and demonstration of visualization tools for constructing physical models [26]. However, there are comparatively few frameworks available to guide and advance skills in creativity and visualization in the computing curriculum.…”