Materialization

Lauren F. Klein: Speculative Designs: Lessons from the Archive of Data Visualization

3 July 2016,10 July 2016, by Geoffrey Rockwell

Lauren Klein‘s paper looked at two 19th century pioneers of data visualization to see what we could learn from them. She asked,

What is the story we tell about the origins of modern data visualization?

What alternative histories emerge? What new forms might we imagine, and what new arguments might we make, if we told that story differently?

Lauren looked at Elizabeth Peabody for an alternative history who is often overlooked because her visualizations are seen as opaque. She compared it to Playfair who is generally considered the first in the canonical history of visualization. Lauren asked why visualizations need to be clear? Why not imagine visualizations that are opaque and learn from them? Her project is a digital recreation project of Peabody’s thinking.

Stan Ruecker: The Digital Is Gravy

25 June 2016, by Geoffrey Rockwell

Stan Ruecker gave the 3DH talk on the 23rd of June with the enigmatic title The Digital Is Gravy. He explained the title in reference to gravy being the what gives flavour to the steak. In his case, he wanted to show us how physical prototyping can give substance (steak) to the digital.

Stan started with an example of a physical prototype that materializes bubblelines that was developed by Milena Radzikowska who showed it at Congress 2016 in Calgary. (See Materializing the Visual.) He suggested that materialization of a visualization slows down analysis and leads to other lines of thought.

At the IIT Institute for Design Stan is weaving physical prototyping into digital design projects. His main research goal is to find ways to encourage people to have multiple opinions. He want to build information systems that encourage the discovery of different perspectives and the presentation of multiple opinions on a phenomenon. The idea is to encourage reflective interpretation rather than dogmatism.

Materializing the Visual

7 June 2016,7 June 2016, by Geoffrey Rockwell

The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities 2016 conference was held this year in Calgary, Alberta. Milena Radzikowska presented a paper on “Materializing Text Analytical Experiences: Taking Bubblelines Literally” in which she showed a physical system designed to materialize a Bubblelines visualization. (Bubblelines is a tool in the Voyant suite of tools.) In here talk she demonstrated the materialization filling tubes with different coloured sand for the words “open” and “free” as they appeared in a text. She talked about how the materialization changed her sense of time and visualization. Read more about the conference in Geoffrey Rockwell’s conference report.