Panel Chairs: Sheelagh Carpendale and Mike Kirby
The Impact of Social Data Visualization
Panel Organizer
Robert Kosara, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Panelists
Brent Fitzgerald, Swivel
Hans Rosling, Gapminder
Warren Sack, University of California, Santa Cruz
Fernanda B. Viégas, IBM Visual Communication Lab
Presentation Slides [PDF]
Visualization is a powerful means of communication, and as such a way not only to gain insight into data, but to change the world. We will discuss current developments of visualization for the masses, the growing awareness of the power of visualization, and the uses of visualization for education, journalism, etc.
Biographies
Robert Kosara is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC). He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology in Austria. Robert considers the visualization of data not only an interesting topic in itself, but wants to see visualization widely adopted in practice and in the real world. Brent Fitzgerald is the chief designer at Swivel.com. He graduated from MIT’s Media Lab, where his research focused on designing and developing applications to support creative collaboration and virtual markets, especially lightweight, socially enforced micro-contracts.
Hans Rosling is a Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the driving force behind Gapminder. While serving as doctor in Moc¸ambique 1979-81, he discoverd konzo, a new epidemic paralytic disease. He later co-foundedM´edecins sans Frontier`es Sweden, started courses and wrote a textbook on global health. Hans co-founded Gapminder to unveil the beauty of statistics by turning boring numbers into enjoyable animations that make sense of the world.
Warren Sack is a media theorist and software designer. He has exhibited work at the ZKM—Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; theWalker Art Center in Minneapolis; the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York City; and, on the Artport website of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Warren earned his B.A. from Yale College and his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. He currently teaches in the Digital Arts & New Media M.F.A. program and in the Film & Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Fernanda B. Viégas is a research scientist in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. Together with Martin Wattenberg, she created Many Eyes. Her work addresses the social and collaborative aspects of data visualization, focusing on representations of online communities to support identity, collective memory, and story-telling. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston.
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