The primary aim of this research thrust is to integrate the arts with the science of big data visualization by asking questions about and creating avenues for pragmatic interdisciplinarity. While the field of scientific visualization has expanded with the introduction of advanced computing, big data, high-fidelity simulations, and other technologies, the majority of research on methods for improving these visualizations has bent toward perceptual theory and away from aesthetics and visual affect. While perceptual precision is imperative, we must also consider the potential benefits of arts theory and practice to analysis, exploration, and communication in big data visualization. How might we expand the vocabulary of visualization, providing a greater variety of visual components that may allow for more intuitive interpretation and ease of differentiation between multiple co-located components? How can we incorporate physical media with the virtual, more closely connecting abstracted, digital data with its physical indexes? What role does affect play in visualization, and how can we operationalize it to improve analysis and communication of big data? See each project below to learn more about how we are investigating these lines of research.
PROJECTS and INSTALLATIONS
Interviewing Greenland’s Ice Sheet
In this project, five specific events in the history of the Greenland ice sheet are “interviewed”, showing how the art and science are interlinked. “Interviews” is a multimodal art installation that seeks to provide viewers with an embodied understanding of glacial change. Through a range of scientific and artistic methodologies we identify distinct phases of knowledge-building about Greenland’s ice as opportunities where texture, form, and diverse data can provide openings for encountering an otherwise overwhelming or threatening reality. Through “Interviews,” viewers are invited to see in Greenland’s past possibilities for a different future.
Artists, Data and Climate Change:
Distilled messages, multiple entry points, layered
Climate Prisms: The Arctic
Climate Prisms: The Arctic is an interactive museum exhibit about three Arctic researchers exploring and documenting the rapidly changing Arctic tundra. The work focuses on these scientists’ primary specialties: geomorphology, hydrology and biogeochemistry.
The work provides entry into their laboratories, field sites and daily research activities, pulling away the veil that obscures the scientific process and grounding abstractions in human experience.
Large Tile Display Presentations
Visualizing Flu Pandemics for Model Validation
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES
Affective Visualization
While significant work has been done in the practical applications of improving the visual vocabularies of scientific visualization, the majority of this work has focused on the perceptual components of visual elements, how they interact, and whether they improve speed or performance in accurately reading data visualizations. However, as data becomes increasingly more complex, layered, multivariate, and especially volumetric and time varying, such perceptual metrics are increasingly difficult to measure, while other, less well-defined variables become more important to consider.
Sub-projects within this project include hand-made glyph-objects and natural color for scientific visualization.
One of the team’s largest focuses is on the concept of “expanded visual vocabularies” for scientific visualization. The rapidly increasing size, density, and complexity of environmental simulation data requires advanced visualization methods that allow scientists and researchers to parse multiple, co-located variables rapidly and intuitively.
Sub-projects contained within this project include Artifact-Based Rendering and associated applets that allow for integration between artistic practice and scientific visualization.
ARTISTIC SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION ENCODINGS
Line
What’s My Line?: Exploring the Expressive Capacity of Lines in Scientific Visualization
The line is a fundamental percept in how we visually construct the world, and a ubiquitous and important geometric element in visualization, serving as reference structure (grids, borders and contours), connector (networks), and paths and flows. The visual features to encode data on line marks are typically limited to width (indicating a scalar value) and simple textures such as dotted or dashed elements regularly distributed across the line (for categorical distinction). In complex visualizations, particularly showing flows the prevailing practice is to use color to encode category, as simple textures are considered to merge together or disappear when there are too many intersecting or overlapping lines. Color works for simple differentiation but removes the ability to use of color for scalar encoding.
Here we begin an inquiry into the scope and feasibility of more complex lines in complex visualizations. We begin with two basic questions: 1. What are distinguishable visual properties of a line that are perceptually and affectively distinct? In other words, what is the viable design space? Following from the above, which properties cause people to associate or group lines, and why?
Color
Color is an integral part of all kinds of data visualization. Though its role in communication and analysis for information visualization has been thoroughly investigated, there is still work to be done to understand its complex role in scientific visualization. While many components of color are quantifiable, color relationships and the complex dynamics produced by different types of data require an artistic approach, one that relies on color theory in order to produce visualizations that are easier to read, parse, communicate with, and analyze. The aim of this ongoing project is to investigate the dimensions of scientists’ needs—especially those who work consistently with large, simulated, and multivariate datasets—and to provide guidance, software, and pre-made color sets and maps to improve visualizations across the board.
