IEEEVis report back

[Micah Vandegrift]

Hello all!

I attended IEEEVis - Vis4DH workshop last week in Berlin. The topic was generally what can Vis and DH learn from one another and share back and forth as they are both young-ish fields, with lots of opportunity for collaboration. 

Here's some top-level takeaways:

* there are some pretty deep methodological differences between the Vis community and digital humanities. Several discussions throughout the day returned to the question of how we can productively bridge that gap. 

* Miriah Meyer gave an intro keynote where she discussed working with poets, and having to shift from vis as problem solving to vis as exploration. I wonder how true that is for others here.

* She reminded the audience that use of a vis can often differ from design intentions, and especially when working with humanists this can be a really challenging process.

* others underlined the need for developing a reflective moment as part of a vis project. Working with humanists can be fruitful in this b/c reflective creativity is a default mode for much of the humanities. 

* we took a LOOOOONG detour discussing the usefulness of dividing the "Humanities" from the "Sciences" with many of our European colleagues proposed that finding a way toward "wissenschaft" will better serve our communities.

* The panel that I was on covered a range of topics from the need for synthetic data sets, differences in languages of the vis/digital humanities fields and the need (or not) for translational actors, conceptualizing a "visualization incubator" and how that might or might not work, and finally, fo course, the structural problems of credit for collaboration. 

Papers and reports can be viewed here - http://vis4dh.org 

My personal takeaway after the meeting was that projects like Immersive Scholar (shameless plug) are attempting to address some of these topics and questions, and that there is a lot of structural work to do (within Universities, evaluation systems, etc.) But, I was encouraged to be in a totally different professional community and feel welcomed and able to keep up with the discussions. 

Anyone else attend other points of interest at IEEEVis? Other conferences? 

Thanks!

Micah V. 

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Micah Vandegrift

Open Knowledge Librarian, Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center
NCSU Libraries

Fulbright-Schuman Innovation Fellow, Oct '18 - Mar '19

    - blogging at medium.com/@mlvandeg 

Lead PI, Immersive Scholar

@micahvandegrift

ORCID: 0000-0001-8429-7697