1. Thoughts on Visualization as a Field of Research and as a Discipline July 17, 2007 Dagstuhl

2. A General Research Goal Develop, enhance, and support Visual Reasoning. Interactive visualization combined with analytical reasoning provide a unique capability for attacking hard, large-scale problems. We should lead in the development of the solutions of these sorts of problems.

3. Hard Problems Problems involving large, multifaceted data from multiple sources and complex, open-ended analyses that must involve humans. Some examples -Large scale, exploratory text analysis -Biological system analyses (bioinformatics) -Time-dependent financial analytics (fraud, risk, compliance, business intelligence) -Large scale environmental computer experiments -Exploratory multimedia analysis For these problems, visualization is a necessary component and visual reasoning a key process. This is worth doing because it will advance our field intellectually, in terms of funding, and in terms of growth in number of researchers and students.

4. Visual Reasoning Reasoning: the process of distinguishing between ideas, creating insights, new relations, based on evidence. Reasoning involve building and testing hypotheses. (Visualization integrated with analytical reasoning) Hypothesis Argument Model We can build a reasoning structure around this, but this must be the core. The structure must include exploration, discovery, hypothesis-building, evidence-gathering, acceptance, or refutation.

5. Visual Reasoning Knowledge Visualization …ability to distinguish between ideas… …insights…relations…reasoning artifacts …models or arguments…hypotheses Among other things, a knowledge visualization approach will provide design principles, for example, -How to effectively support exploration. -Defining the role of interaction (cognitively) -Determining the (task-dependent) value of specific visualizations and thus determining what to visualize.

6. Visualization as a Discipline

7. Act Like a Discipline What is our curriculum? Where are our textbooks!? What are the Job and Career Opportunities of our students and practitioners?

8. Teach Visual Literacy Companies don’t understand. Students don’t understand (People in the GIS community have been talking about a similar thing, “Teaching spatial literacy”. We can learn from each other.) The public doesn’t understand what visualization is about & what it’s effective for. This requires a broader perspective in our curriculum. A general goal would be to achieve visual literacy for the general literate public.

9. An Example: GIS Curriculum Questions Asked Annual demand by professionals for GIS course work ? Annual demand for GIS students enrolled in universities? How many US certificate-granting programs? Shortfall in producing individuals with an advanced level of GIS education? Classification of GIS professionals and educational market segments?