Workshop "From data to information: Visualization practices and challenges"

Abstract - The encyclopaedist and documentalist Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and the logical positivist and sociologist Otto Neurath (1882-1945) both used graphic and scenographic means to inform visitors or readers about the world they were living in, and they hoped to reform the visitor’s mode of seeing that world. Through visualizations, compiling these infographics in books, and displaying the info in the format of museological displays, Otlet and Neurath took into account the changing nature of visual media and structural transformations in pedagogical thought. Despite the similarities of their respective projects, Otlet and Neurath adhered to a different positivist philosophy of science, which I will describe in this paper through the model of the pyramid and mozaics,, and the consequences that this had in their interaction with international politics that included a politics of education.

Bio - Wouter Van Acker is senior researcher and chair of architectural theory at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) since 2016. He is coordinator of the research group on history, theory and criticism, Hortence, at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the ULB. Before he was lecturer in architectural history and theory at Griffith University (2013-2015) and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (2011-2012). His research focus is the history of epistemology and aesthetics in architecture in the twentieth century, and in particular the relation between changing epistemological models and aesthetic shifts in modernism and post-modernism. His PhD dissertation (Ghent University, 2011) explored these issues in the work of Paul Otlet (1868-1944), Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and Otto Neurath (1882-1945).

Abstract - Les méthodes d'accès à l'expérience d'un acteur dans le cours de ses activités mobilisent toujours plus de traces (vidéo, capteurs physiologiques, etc.). Ces traces fournissent des indices de l'expérience, mais ne révèlent pas l'expérience elle-même. Il faut pour cela les enrichir, les annoter, vérifier leur cohérence, les organiser visuellement au sein d'une structure informationnelle. Les modalités de visualisation permettent alors l’appropriation de la signification par le chercheur mais elles contraignent aussi l'émergence du sens.

Bio - Daniel Schmitt est muséologue, enseignant-chercheur de l’Université de Valenciennes, spécialisé dans la médiation des savoirs et les nouveaux médias. Il a participé à de nombreux projets de musées et d’expositions en France et à l’étranger : Allemagne, Suisse, Italie, Royaume-Uni, Suède, Hongrie, Égypte, Sri Lanka, Équateur, Pérou, Japon. Il est actuellement membre du board de l’ICOFOM (ICOM International Committee for Museology).

Abstract - Nowadays sensors, databases, social networks, and applications generate what is commonly known as 'big data': huge collections of dynamic, multidimensional, hybrid, unstructured, and incomplete data collections. Automatic making sense of such datasets is hard, so visual exploration is a key component of the process of discovering insights and solving problems based on the data. However, the aforementioned characteristics of big data make its visual exploration very challenging. In this talk, we discuss several novel design aspects and solutions for visualizing big data: dense pixel maps for coping with size; projections for coping with many dimensions; visual simplification techniques for coping with clutter and complexity; and interaction for helping users to investigate various perspectives to form, refine, and validate hypotheses. We exemplify the above with data and use-cases from software maintenance, stock trading, medical science, and air traffic control.

Bio - Alexandru Telea received his PhD (2000) in Computer Science from the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, in visualization system design. Until 2007, he was assistant professor in visualization and computer graphics at the same university. Since 2007, he is professor of multiscale visual analytics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His interests include 3D multiscale shape processing, information visualization (with a focus on relational and multidimensional data), software visualization, and visual analytics. He has published over 200 papers in the above fields. He is the author of the well-known textbook “Data Visualization - Principles and Practice” (CRC Press, 2014), and was involved in the creation of two start-ups in visual analytics.

Abstract - In our increasingly data-driven societies, data are accorded growing importance, assumed to have the power to explain our social world and relied upon in decision-making that affects all our lives. Increasingly, data matter. An important way that many people get access to data is through visualisations which, like the data on which they are based, are also widely circulated – ‘data are mobilised graphically’, say Gitelman and Jackson (2013:12). Academic research, world news, sports stats and our own digital footsteps are increasingly communicated in visualised-datafied forms. This presentation draws on a range of research projects which investigate data visualisation from a critical humanities and social science perspective, to reflect simultaneously on the possibilities that data visualisation opens up and the problems that it ushers forth. It considers two dominant ideas about datavis: the first is the belief in the power of visualisations to promote greater understanding of data and the second is the argument that visualisations do persuasive, ideological work, privileging certain viewpoints and serving as mechanisms of power and control. To these two perspectives I add two further issues emerging from my research: the politics of the pragmatic challenges involved producing a good data visualisation, and the emotional dimensions of engaging with data through visualisations. The paper concludes by bringing these divergent perspectives together in a framework for thinking about (and thinking with) data visualisation.

Bio - Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Sheffield. Her research has focused on: social media, data in society, data visualisation, inequality, web design, digital identity. Recent work includes a) Seeing Data (www.seeingdata.org), which explored how non-experts relate to data visualisations, and b) Post, Mine, Repeat (2016), about what happens when social media data mining becomes ordinary (both funded by the AHRC). She is interested in critical approaches to big data and data visualisations, how people live with data, how to make datafication and its consequences transparent, and whether it’s possible to ‘live well’ with data.

Abstract - City production and its sociability come from injunctive frameworks which finds solutions in the development of instruments of rationalization and symbolic representation based on digital innovation and screens. Digital mediatization of modern cities combines public rationalization of forms of communication and urban know-how based on the collection of digital data with the production and dissemination of messages about the city by both local media and citizens. By proposing to study singular semiotic forms in projects and practices that give them value, power and meaning,this communication aims to, namely to set out the temporal, social and interpretive tensions of digital urban mediation in the context of Smart cities.

Bio - Julia Bonaccorsi is full Professor at Université Lumière Lyon 2 since 2013, she's the Head of the Master “Urban mediations, Knowledges and Expertises” at Université de Lyon and she manage the line of research on Digital Humanities in the Human Sciences Institute (Lyon). As specialist in media and textual transformations, she aims to the analysis of written culture and its mutations, at the intersection of semiology and ethnography, especially on urban issues. Since 2016, she has been coordinating the urban digital identities project (IDENUM) funded by the LabEx IMU.