Revealing Nature, Generating Insight

In 2009, in order to emphasize and integrate the multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches to Visualization in Science and Education, the conference will be organized into daylong themes. Each theme will be examined from the perspectives of physical scientists, cognitive scientists and psychologists, and science educations. The themes are: Uncertainty & Ambiguity; Simplicity & Complexity; Creativity & Discovery; Dynamism & Interactivity; and Diversity & Multiplicity. For more information, please visit the Chairs' web site.

Uncertainty & Ambiguity

Scientific data are never exact, they contain errors or have limited accuracy; theories and hypotheses can be limited by uncertainty and ambiguity; and science evolves and is taught in a state of incomplete knowledge. Visualization transforms scientific data and hypotheses into a concrete form to aid understanding, promote exploration, and facilitate communication and learning. How can we visualize the uncertainty and error in the data we represent? How can we distinguish between what we know and what we don’t know in the images that we create? How do we present science so that what we visualize does not create a false sense of certainty, but reflects the state of our knowledge? The visualization of uncertainty and ambiguity is an evolving area of exploration in fields as disparate as computer graphics, information visualization, and scientific illustration. This session will explore various approaches to the problem.

Simplicity & Complexity

One of the most important roles that scientific visualizations must play is to make complex and multifaceted information accessible by simplifying it in some way. This leads to advances in computer science as Cyberinfrastructure researchers investigate news way to harness these technologies which then in turn lead to advances in scientific understanding. Visualizations have a fundamental role to play in helping us understand the complexity of phenomena we are trying to study (such as David Goodsell’s work on molecular complexity). But we also acknowledge the reverse side of the coin – the benefits of simplicity – and so will explore how representations such as cartoons and simple drawings can have many benefits for scientists, learners and the general public alike. Finally, we also explore the costs and benefits of simplicity and complexity by examining such issues how whether perceptual fidelity or abstraction is better for learners.

Creativity & Discovery

The important roles that visualizations play in scientific discovery, scientific communication, and expertise is well known. In this theme we will explore what we can learn from how great scientists invented and used visualisations (such as Faraday or Feynman), how experts use visualisations to make discoveries about their disciplines (example e.g, the Tree of Life) and how learners can generate important insights into science by being encouraged to inventing their own representations (e.g. inventing to prepare for future learning by Martin and Schwartz)

Dynamism & Interactivity

Visualisations in computational media allows for degrees of interactivity and dynamism that are just not possible with paper-based representations. In this theme we will explore what benefits that this increased interactivity can bring for scientists and learners – for example, in the use of tangible interfaces, educational games and simulations. However, we will resist “technoboosterism” by acknowledging that this interactivity can have unwanted consequences. In exploring dynamic representations, we first investigate the many different ways there are to represent time and what implications this has for scientists, learners and the general public. We also explore the prototypical case of using time to represent time (animation) and examine the cognitive consequences of animation.

Diversity & Multiplicity

In this day long theme, we explore many different issues around the topics of diversity and multiplicity. We explore the perspective of multimodality - how scientific phenomena are typically presented using multiple representations. We also explore how multiple devices are now used for science visualisations, focussing in particular upon handheld and personal devices. This links to the final theme of informal learning and public understanding as we explore how visualisations are used in public understanding and outreach, and indeed what role that personal technologies can play in supporting this.