Logo by Allie Packard
Date and Location: The workshop will be held online on October 16 or 17.
While the visualization field consists of researchers exploring how people perceive information and different data visualization tools and platforms, there is an even larger community of analysts, practitioners, and organizations who are creating data and information visualizations and communicating their work every day. The challenges these groups face in communicating their work are often distinct from the research taking place in the academic community.
Most people experience visualization as communication and presentation. The New York Times and other publications regularly release interactive visuals depicting complex datasets including political topics, budgets, and sports. An independent community of visualization practitioners and bloggers has also sprung up, producing and deconstructing visualizations of data of broad interest. Free visualization tools such as D3, Data Wrapper, Tableau Public, and others are available and widely used.
The VisComm workshop brings together practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplines to address questions raised by the new and evolving role of data visualization in our everyday lives. We encourage participation from journalists, designers, practitioners, health communicators, and others who do not typically attend IEEE VIS.
The workshop will be held remotely and online on October 16 or 17, 2022.
Join our mailing list/google group! We'll use it for general discussion and updates around visualization for communication.
9:05AM - 9:17AM:
How Do Captions Affect Visualization Reading?
Hanxiu 'Hazel' Zhu, Shelly Shiying Cheng, Eugene Wu
Abstract: Captions help readers better understand visualizations. However, if the visualization is intended to communicate specific features, should the caption be statistical, and focus on specific values, or perceptual, and focus on general patterns? ...
9:17AM - 9:29AM:
Scoping the Future of Visualization Literacy: A Review
Mara Solen
Access to information is increasing rapidly, and data visualizations are becoming increasingly common as a way to communicate summaries of large datasets, especially in media designed for the general public. Accompanying this rise in visualization is a need for visualization literacy...
9:29AM - 9:41AM:
Negotiating visualization minimalism: a preliminary analysis of Twitter conversations
Prakash Chandra Shukla, Dr Paul Parsons
Concepts related to visualization minimalism, such as ‘chartjunk’ and ‘data-ink’, have received significant attention in the visualization literature and have been subject to intense debate and disagreement...
9:41AM - 9:53AM:
User Engagement with COVID-19 Visualizations on Twitter
Robert Kasumba, Saugat Pandey, Vishesh Patel, Micah Wolfson, Alvitta Ottley
Data visualizations have been a key component of online discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, research on how they affect public engagement is scarce. Understanding this would aid creating of visualizations that maximize engagements by public officials and visualization specialists...
9:53AM - 10:05AM:
A Qualitative Evaluation and Taxonomy of Student Annotations on Bar Charts
Md Dilshadur Rahman, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, Paul Rosen
When sharing visualizations, annotations provide valuable insights into the data by focusing attention on important visual elements. As a result, annotations have become an essential part of visualizations, primarily when externalizing data or engaging in collaborative analysis. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how people annotate visualizations...
10:05AM - 10:10AM:
Late Breaking Work: Persuasive Interactive Data Visualizations: Perspective Matters
Lynne Cotter
Dashboards with health information are commonplace among persuasive health communication campaigns, such as those to decrease negative health behaviors (e.g., smoking), or increase positive behaviors (e.g., COVID-19 vaccinations)...
10:10AM - 10:15AM:
Late Breaking Work: Visual Communication of Potential Anomalies with Boundary Lines in ISS Mission Control
Paul C. Parsons, Zixu Zhang
Boundary lines for telemetry data have been used widely among International Space Station (ISS) flight controllers on their displays. These programmable lines are used as important references to aid in anomaly detection and response. Investigating how ISS flight controllers currently use boundary lines helps us understand how potentially anomalous data...
Panel discussion on The Future of Visualizaton with Mike Bostock, Jessica Hullman, Sheelagh Carpendale, Duncan Geere followed by Q&A with attendees
Moderated by Alvitta Ottley
VisComm seeks contributions addressing questions including:
We particularly encourage contributors to address and illustrate issues like these with visual case studies that demonstrate the success or failure of communicative visualization projects in data journalism, public health and more. Our goal is to consider a broad range of examples and learn from their design decisions and process.
We invite contributions from any discipline, but particularly encourage journalists and designers to submit their work involving data-based communication or reporting. Scientific contributions concerning visualization for communication are of course welcome, as well.
VisComm has four submission tracks: short papers (research or position), visual case studies, and late-breaking works in progress. Selection criteria are clarity, relevance to the workshop, innovation, and quality of questions for attendees.
We invite submission of research papers between 2 and 6 pages long, including references, with length matching content. Research papers will be reviewed based on how well claims are supported by evidence. Submissions are expected to include all materials and data needed to replicate and reproduce any figures, analyses, and methods. If anything cannot be publicly shared (e.g., for data privacy concerns), state the reason in the paper.
We invite submission of position papers between 2 and 6 pages long, including references, with length matching content. Position papers are problem discussions or statements describing the author's relevant experience and ideas with regards to methods and methodologies for visualization research, and in particular the focus topic of the workshop. Position papers will be selected according to their importance and relevance for the workshop topics and how well they will fit the planned discussions.
We invite practitioners to submit a one-page write-up together with a link to an online piece or a short video. The write-up should explain what you made, why you made it, outcome/responses (both expected and unexpected), etc. The goal is to show the work of journalists, designers, people working for governments or non-profits, etc., who use data to inform and communicate.
The purpose of this category is to present work in progress and receive feedback from attendees.
For research that is in progress, this session will provide a supportive atmosphere for helpful feedback and fresh perspectives on your aims and/or methods. Recommended structure for your one-page submission is: introduction, preliminary methods, preliminary findings (if applicable), and questions for attendees.
For practitioners, this is an opportunity to present contributions that showcase innovative visualizations or provide provocations for new ideas to emerge. Your one-page brief should include project background, design objectives, methods or design process, links to visualization design alternatives, preliminary findings (if available), and questions for attendees.
Your paper, abstract or write-up should take the form of a PDF file, formatted in the VGTC conference style, which has both LaTeX and MS Word templates. However, please replace the statement about IEEE copyright and reprints with the following text: "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License."
All submissions should contain full author names and affiliations. If applicable, a short video (up to 5 min. in length) may also be submitted. Submissions will be juried by the organizers. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference (even if only for the workshop). Registration information is available on the IEEE VIS website.
All accepted submissions will be posted on the workshop website.
We expect authors of accepted submissions to post their documents on the Open Science Framework's preprint archive, using the instructions we send. Authors are welcome to post an initial version of their submission earlier. Our OSF workshop papers are not considered archival by IEEE, and may be published elsewhere at a later date. However, we understand that authors from non-engineering disciplines may have different prior publication standards; please contact the chairs if you must publish your accepted submission differently.
Presenting authors can make use of a reduced workshop-only registration fee at IEEE VIS. Additionally, the IEEE VIS Inclusivity & Diversity Scholarship Committee provides complimentary conference registration based on need.
deadlines occur at 11:59 PM in the last timezone on Earth.
At VisComm, we want to provide avenues for collaboration and networking. We are creating a directory of people willing to be contacted about their areas of expertise. The directory will be unveiled during VIS week and thereafter will be available to anyone who signs up for the VisComm email list. Follow this link to add your entry to the directory
The quickest way to contact VisComm's organizers is via their shared email, viscomm_chairs@googlegroups.com
Alice Feng, Urban Institute
Alvitta Ottley, Washington University in St. Louis
Barbara Millet, University of Miami
Jonathan Schwabish, Urban Institute
Melanie Bancilhon, Washington University in St. Louis
Sunwoo Ha, Washington University in St. Louis
Quian Ma, University of Miami
2021 schedule, papers and posters
2020 schedule, papers and posters