The Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Visualization in Science and Education is a premier meeting for active researchers from a variety of disciplines including scientific visualization, use of visualization in education, visualization design, virtual reality, cognitive research, etc. The conference provides a framework to exchange ideas and build a broadening community around a crucial cross-and trans-disciplinary field that supports scientific research and science education. This three-phase project builds on the previous meetings and activities of the interdisciplinary community of the Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education, dating back to 1994. Phase 1 includes three pre-conference workshops (on Design Principles for the New Media, Assessing Visualizations: Design & Effectiveness, and Forging Creative Communities with Web-based Tools) and a new interactive Sci-Viz website informs and engages past and potential future members of the community with information on the pre-workshops and the conference itself, and serves as an organizing tool for dissemination and the design of the 2013 conference. Phase 2 (the conference itself) follows traditional GRC format and is held at Bryant University in July 2011 (see http://bit.ly/grc-viz-2011). Phase 3 includes collaborative efforts supported via mini-grants, post-conference activities which include a meeting to produce a follow-up report on results and lessons learned from the 8 meetings of the Visualization GRC conference series plus follow-up online activities that involve the wider community in ongoing revisions of the report as well as contributing shared resources.
The broader impacts of the conference and its associated activities are to strengthen the professional interdisciplinary community around science visualization. Interactive community website (http://taxane.chem.unb.ca/GRC-SciViz) will provide information on the series of activities and include a report outlining future research directions and collaborative activities.
The Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education allows experts and researchers in various science disciplines who develop or use visualizations to come together with experts in cognition, psychology and the learning sciences; science educators; evaluators; assessment experts; designers and artists; computer scientists; and others who develop the fundamental tools for visualization. The first biennial GRC-VSE was in1994. The next meeting is in 2015. The community includes practitioners, educators and researchers from cognitive science to visual arts, chemistry to the geosciences, science education to public engagement with science, publishers to graphic arts, and software development to data mining. By presenting results and sharing insights, the conference nurtures the visualization research community and helps to disseminate the resulting principles to designers and practitioners. Questions addressed include: What are the underlying lessons from the cognitive and learning sciences that can inform the design of effective visualizations in science and science education? What are the limits of visualizations and what skills and experience are required to prepare students to learn from visualizations? How do we keep abreast of technological developments that will impact the creation of visualizations? What are some best practices for creating visualizations for learners and researchers? Well-known speakers interact with other participants. Artist Graham Johnson’s work was featured on the cover of Science three times. Photographer Felice Frankel has published several books on science visualization. Artist/illustrator Drew Berry and computer scientist Maneesh Agrawala are MacArthur Genius Award winners. Comic artist and author Larry Gonick was a speaker in 2011. This project supported pre-conference workshops on Design Principles for the New Media, Assessing Visualizations: Design & Effectiveness, and Forging Creative Communities with Web-based Tools. The workshops connected experts in design and assessment with practitioners, offering participants the chance to prototype visualizations and assessments with expert and peer feedback. Funding for the main conference at Bryant University (July 2011) provided support for speakers, graduate students, and post-docs. Support for collaborative mini-grants was awarded to three interdisciplinary groups of attendees. Past chairs and speakers are a part of these teams, and many groups have then collaborated on successfully funded NSF grants. A follow-up workshop has generated a report on Lessons Learned and Recommendations for Future Research. Conference evaluation data from 2001, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011 shows that conferees give the GRC-VSE high marks, citing the opportunity to network with colleagues, the diversity of the conferees work, and the conference structure, which enhances the ability to learn from and interact with each other. In recent years over 90% of conferees rate the meeting "above average" when compared to all other Gordon Conferences. Intellectual Merit: Lessons learned by the community Practical design principles for various types of scientific visualizations across disciplines Visualization designers must constantly adjust as new methods, modalities, and technologies become available A range of effective design strategies to help scientists represent complexity, abstractness, and large data sets. The importance of incorporating lessons from cognitive scientists on how people process and learn from visualizations. The importance of incorporating educational research methods to measure effectiveness of visualizations Coordinate/synchronize multiple representations of scientific phenomenon New methods to illustrate the unseen and represent dynamic processes How best to align the tactical (how to depict) with the strategic (what to depict) Broader Impacts: Recommendations for future visualization research What roles do audience, information flow between producers and consumers, physical context, social context, and human-computer-interface (HCI) play? How do we define visualization fluency? Is visualization fluency domain specific? What is required of visualization tools to support fluency? How to assess impact of visualization in producing fluency? What misinterpretations/misconceptions can arise from visualizations? What socio-cultural factors impact fluency? How do we shift our design principles and best practices to accommodate the new tools, immersive technologies, and mobile devices used tp collect data, create visualizations, and display our work? How do we measure the effectiveness of visualizations? There is a need for a comprehensive list of visualization affordances across disciplines coupled with established, tested/validated methods to define and measure effectiveness? How can we, as educators, make best use of visualizations in instruction and assessment? What are the best tools and pedagogical practices to support students making their own visualizations? What do visualizations reveal about thinking and learning and how do humans process visual information? Complex visualizations are central in interpreting scientific data, teaching science, diagnosing diseases, monitoring the environment, and communicating the beauty and complexity of the natural and physical world to the general public. The combination of pre-conference workshops, strategically selected plenary speakers, support for junior researchers who may emerge as future leaders in the field, and a highly competitive Visionary Mini-Grant program fosters a large community of practice for the study of how visualization can enhance science understanding and assist in the production of knowledge. Read the full report online. http://bit.ly/visualization-sci-edu Available for download here.
