Expanding the Visual Vocabulary of Scientific Visualization

Scientific visualization has traditionally relied on a narrow set of geometric shapes such as circles, squares, and cubes to represent data. Although these forms are functional, they limit how scientists can express complexity, nuance, and relationships within large or intricate datasets. This research expands that visual vocabulary by drawing inspiration from the wide range of forms, textures, symbols, and aesthetic strategies found in art and design. By broadening the representational toolkit, it becomes possible to depict scientific information in ways that are more expressive, intuitive, and visually rich. This work challenges the sparse conventions of traditional visualization and explores how new visual forms can reveal patterns and stories that might otherwise remain hidden. The ultimate aim is to reshape how scientific information is communicated by embracing the full spectrum of visual possibilities available in the world

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Let Them Not Say ~ A collaboration between Jane Hirshfield, poet, and Francesca Samsel and Greg Abram, visualization artists

Artistic Practice: Mixing The Currents Of Science and Data ~ Our work relies on the interplay of art, technology, and science, and the dance of these disciplines as they augment one another to create an emotional connection between the audience and the data. Prior work focused on building out artistic vocabulary for clear, engaging science exploration and communication. Within this portfolio, we move through the steps of science inquiry and data representation, toward creating new layers of meaning and connection through affective visualizations.

Associative Forms For Encoding Multivariate Climate Data ~ Our goal is to use scientific and artistic methods to combine these environmental expressions and personal experience through the creation of glyphs visually abstracted from and associated with forms in nature in the representation of climate data. The use of these glyphs removes the distinctions between scientific data and sensory experience, to allow a fuller intuitive association between the two, creating an embodied experience and increasing awareness of the climate effects and changes all around us.

Affective, Hand-Sculpted Glyph Forms for Engaging and Expressive Scientific Visualization ~ As scientific data continues to grow in size, complexity, and density, the representation scope of three-dimensional spaces, data sampling methods, and transfer functions have improved in parallel, allowing visualization practitioners to produce richer multidimensional encodings. Glyphs, in particular, have become an essential encoding tool due to their versatile applications in co-located multi-variate volumetric datasets.

IEEE VISAP 2023: Mixtures of Human Experience, Intellectual Analysis, Data Representation and Our Natural Environment ~ The work presented here seeks be a conduit assisting us to close the gap between our human emotional connection to nature from our intellectual study and the sterile analytical imagery we use to understand the invisible physical changes underway.

Artifact-Based Rendering ~  a multidisciplinary, cross-institutional team creating tools that bring artists, designers, and others outside of the sciences directly into the visualization process. Generating new methodologies through integration of the arts and the sciences, the Collaborative creates a richer, expanded vocabulary for visualization that improves domain science research, team collaboration, and public-facing communication about important issues in climate, computing, neurology, archeology, biology, and more.

Artistic Encodings on Antarctic Ocean Data ~ Artifact-based rendering was created to enable artists and designers to apply their expertise to large multivariate data in a language from familiar and a workflow common to their field. The intent behind artifact based rendering is to enable intuitive association and clear visual distinction of data sets with large numbers.

Sculpting Data ~ The Sculpting Vis Collaborative, lead by Daniel Keefe and Francesca Samsel, is comprised of an artist, computer scientists and environmental research groups. We draw color palettes, shapes, form and texture from nature, use them to encode complex large-scale climate data and models, thus rendering the complexities within the data in a language representing the world in which we call home. Rather than an abstract image, our work closes the gap between the synthetically colored representations of data and the environments being represented by that data. More on our work can be found at Sculpting-Vis.org.

Scientific Visualization: Art, Nature, and Vocabulary ~ In this work, we explore an expanded visual design vocabulary inspired by patterns and forms in nature, aiming to represent complexity more harmoniously. We present initial experiments comparing this nature-inspired approach to conventional visualization defaults and demonstrate how the expanded vocabulary can improve clarity and information density in scientific data representations

Artifact-Based Rendering: Harnessing Natural and Traditional Visual Media for More Expressive and Engaging 3D Visualizations ~ We introduce Artifact-Based Rendering (ABR), a framework of tools, algorithms, and processes that makes it possible to produce real, data-driven 3D scientific visualizations with a visual language derived entirely from colors, lines, textures, and forms created using traditional physical media or found in nature. A theory and process for ABR is presented to address three current needs: (i) designing better visualizations by making it possible for non-programmers to rapidly design and critique many alternative data-to-visual mappings; (ii) expanding the visual vocabulary used in scientific visualizations to depict increasingly complex multivariate data; (iii) bringing a more engaging, natural, and human-relatable handcrafted aesthetic to data visualization.

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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?

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Extracting Palettes from Nature to Enrich Geoscience Visualizations ~ The combination of our color-associated predatory instincts and affective response provides us with a geographical sense of place—a borderless concept defined by our relationship to an environment. In order to draw more fully on color’s power to make and define place in visualization, we present a new type of color system that expands the traditional palette of scientific visualization, a tool for extracting these palettes from natural imagery, and a selection of pre-made palettes available for download on sciviscolor.org. Historically, scientific visualization has engaged only a very narrow range of highly-saturated hues. By mimicking palettes anthropologically and evolutionarily intrinsic to our understanding of the world, we can visually re-establish the connection between big environmental data and its source, allowing us to quickly adopt new and semantically appropriate encoding systems for improved analysis and communication.

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.

New Default Colormap for ParaView ~ After a decade of research into color maps for scientific visualization the primary scientific visualization software, ParaView, has adopted a default colormap, the design of which was driven by artistic color theory principles

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PUBLICATIONS

What’s My Line: Exploring the Expressive Capacity of Lines in Scientific Visualization

Sculpting Data: How HPC and Art Create the Future of Scientific Visualization

A New Default Colormap for ParaView

Associative Forms for Multivariate Climate Data

Human Fingerprints and Artistic Vocabulary; Rendering Data, Creating Engagement, Connection and Context to Earth System Models

Affective, Hand-Sculpted Glyph Forms for Engaging and Expressive Scientific Visualization

Associative Forms for Encoding Multivariate Climate Data

Scientific Visualization: Art, Nature, and Vocabulary

Artifact-Based Rendering: Harnessing Natural and Traditional Visual Media for More Expressive and Engaging 3D Visualizations

ASSOCIATED PUBLICATIONS

Colormaps that improve perception of high-resolution ocean data

Environmental Visualization: Moving Beyond the Rainbows

Intuitive colormaps for environmental visualization

Colormapping resources and strategies for organized intuitive environmental visualization

Relevant Citations

ABR Applets

SciVisColor

Quiet Climate Communication: Beauty and Poetry