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This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combines knowledge from different fields, is tailored to suit diverse audiences and contexts, and frequently incorporates tacit knowledge. This complex nature leads to a series of interrelated challenges for data visualization education. Driven by a lack of consolidated knowledge, overview, and orientation for visualization education, the 21 authors of this paper - educators and researchers in data visualization - identify and describe 19 challenges informed by our collective practical experience. We organize these challenges around seven themes People, Goals & Assessment, Environment, Motivation, Methods, Materials, and Change. Across these themes, we formulate 43 research questions to address these challenges. As part of our call to action, we then conclude with 5 cross-cutting opportunities and respective action items: embrace DIVERSITY+INCLUSION, build COMMUNITIES, conduct RESEARCH, act AGILE, and relish RESPONSIBILITY. We aim to inspire researchers, educators and learners to drive visualization education forward and discuss why, how, who and where we educate, as we learn to use visualization to address challenges across many scales and many domains in a rapidly changing world: viseducationchallenges.github.io.

Data physicalizations have gained prominence across domains, but their environmental impact has been largely overlooked. This work addresses this gap by investigating the interplay between sustainability and physicalization practices. We conducted interviews with experts from diverse backgrounds, followed by a survey to gather insights into how they approach physicalization projects and reflect on sustainability. Our thematic analysis revealed sustainability considerations throughout the entire physicalization life cycle -- a framework that encompasses various stages in a physicalization's existence. Notably, we found no single agreed-upon definition for sustainable physicalizations, highlighting the complexity of integrating sustainability into physicalization practices. We outline sustainability challenges and strategies based on participants' experiences and propose the Sustainable Physicalization Practices (SuPPra) Matrix, providing a structured approach for designers to reflect on and enhance the environmental impact of their future physicalizations., Comment: To be published in CHI 2024

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 23381 "Visualization and the Humanities: Towards a Shared Research Agenda". The seminar was motivated by the fact that visualization has become a vital element in (digital) humanist research practices recently, while the value and impact of research at the intersection of visualization and the humanities is still widely debated and frequently contested from both sides. Visualization scholars critique the service-oriented focus on visualization as a tool to facilitate humanist research, which hampers the discovery of complementary and mutually enriching research perspectives for all fields involved. At the same time, humanists warn of visualizations' roots in the quantitative sciences which introduce non-trivial shifts in the topology of knowledge-power, creating epistemic, political, ethical, pedagogical, and cultural tensions. Building on advances in this young and highly interdisciplinary research area, the seminar discussed how to leverage synergies and how to build productively on tensions between methodologies at the intersection of visualization and (digital) humanities fields that span a vast spectrum of research philosophies and methods. The seminar thus brought together researchers and practitioners from the fields of visualization, computer science, the humanities, and design to reflect on existing research methods within visualization and the humanities, to identify tensions and synergies between the different fields, and to develop concrete avenues that address and leverage these.

Data visualization is becoming an important asset for a data-literate, informed, and critical society. Despite the variety of existing resources to teach theories and practical skills in this domain, little is known about 1) how learning processes in the context of visualization unfold and 2) best practices for engaging and teaching data visualization to diverse audiences and in different contexts. This Dagstuhl Seminar invited practitioners, researchers, and teachers from the areas of visualization, design, education and cognitive psychology to explore these questions from multiple perspectives. Through a range of practical activities, talks, and discussions, we have begun characterizing and classifying teaching methodologies. We have redacted a pedagogical manifesto, and started formalizing the concept of improvisation with visualization in the context of teaching and learning. We have also interrogated creativity as an important aspect of visualization teaching and learning and explored links between data physicalization and visualization teaching activities. Across these different themes, we have begun to map out the challenges of visualization teaching and learning and the opportunities for research and practice in this area.

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combines knowledge from different fields, is tailored to suit diverse audiences and contexts, and frequently incorporates tacit knowledge. This complex nature leads to a series of interrelated challenges for data visualization education. Driven by a lack of consolidated knowledge, overview, and orientation for visualization education, the 21 authors of this paper-educators and researchers in data visualization-identify and describe 19 challenges informed by our collective practical experience. We organize these challenges around seven themes People, Goals & Assessment, Environment, Motivation, Methods, Materials, and Change. Across these themes, we formulate 43 research questions to address these challenges. As part of our call to action, we then conclude with 5 cross-cutting opportunities and respective action items: embrace DIVERSITY+INCLUSION, build COMMUNITIES, conduct RESEARCH, act AGILE, and relish RESPONSIBILITY. We aim to inspire researchers, educators and learners to drive visualization education forward and discuss why, how, who and where we educate, as we learn to use visualization to address challenges across many scales and many domains in a rapidly changing world: viseducationchallenges.github.io., Comment: Accepted for publication at VIS 2023 Conference, Melbourne, VIC

This paper draws together nine strategies for creative visualization activities. Teaching visualization often involves running learning activities where students perform tasks that directly support one or more topics that the teacher wishes to address in the lesson. As a group of educators and researchers in visualization, we reflect on our learning experiences. Our activities and experiences range from dividing the tasks into smaller parts, considering different learning materials, to encouraging debate. With this paper, our hope is that we can encourage, inspire, and guide other educators with visualization activities. Our reflections provide an initial starting point of methods and strategies to craft creative visualisation learning activities, and provide a foundation for developing best practices in visualization education., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Accepted at 4th IEEE Workshop on Visualization Guidelines in Research, Design, and Education (VisGuides 2022), at IEEE VIS 2022

Transcription, annotation, digitization and/or visualization are common transformations that historical documents such as national records, birth/death registers, university records, letters or books undergo. Reasons for those transformations span from the (physical) protection of the original materials to disclosure of 'hidden' information or patterns within the documents. Even though such transformations bring new insights and perspectives on the documents, they also modify the documents' content, structure, and/or artifactual form and thus, occlude prior knowledge and interpretation. When it comes to visualization as a means to transform historical documents from written to abstract visual form, there is typically little acknowledgment or even understanding of the previous transformation steps these documents have gone through. The 'tremendous rhetorical force' of visualization, we argue, should not be at the expense of the multiple pasts, contexts, and curators that are inherent in historical record collections. Rather, the urgent question for the fields of visualization and the (digital) humanities is how to better support awareness of these multiple layers of interpretation and the people behind them when representing historical documents. We begin to address this question based on a collection of historical university records by (a) investigating common transformation processes of historical documents, and (b) discussing opportunities and challenges for making such transformations transparent through what we call 'provenance-driven visualization'; the idea for a visualization that makes visible the layers of transformation (including interpretation, re-structuring, and curation) inherent in historical documents.

While previous work exists on how to conduct and disseminate insights from problem-driven visualization projects and design studies, the literature does not address how to accomplish these goals in transdisciplinary teams in ways that advance all disciplines involved. In this paper we introduce and define a new methodological paradigm we call design by immersion, which provides an alternative perspective on problem-driven visualization work. Design by immersion embeds transdisciplinary experiences at the center of the visualization process by having visualization researchers participate in the work of the target domain (or domain experts participate in visualization research). Based on our own combined experiences of working on cross-disciplinary, problem-driven visualization projects, we present six case studies that expose the opportunities that design by immersion enables, including (1) exploring new domain-inspired visualization design spaces, (2) enriching domain understanding through personal experiences, and (3) building strong transdisciplinary relationships. Furthermore, we illustrate how the process of design by immersion opens up a diverse set of design activities that can be combined in different ways depending on the type of collaboration, project, and goals. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential pitfalls of design by immersion., Comment: The paper has been accepted to IEEE VIS (InfoVis) 2019, and will appear IEEE TVCG. ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation methods

We address the issue of enabling text entry for walk-up-and-use interactive tabletop displays located in public spaces. Public tabletop installations are characterized by a diverse target user group, multi-person interaction, and the need for high approachability and intuitiveness. We first define the design constraints of text-entry methods for public tabletop installations such as clear affordances, audience expertise, support of direct-touch interaction, visual appearance, space requirements, multi-user support, and technical simplicity. We then describe an iterative design process that was informed by these constraints and led to the development of two stylus keyboard prototypes—BubbleQWERTY and BubbleCIRCLE—for use in interactive public tabletop installations.

We present the findings from a longitudinal study of iPad use in a Primary school classroom. While tablet devices have found their way into classroom environments, we still lack in depth and long-term studies of how they integrate into everyday classroom activities. Our findings illustrate in-classroom tablet use and the broad range of learning activities in subjects such as maths, languages, social sciences, and even physical education. Our observations expand current models on teaching and learning supported by tablet technology. Our findings are child-centred, focusing on three different roles that tablets can play as part of learning activities: Friend, Functionary, and Facilitator. This new perspective on in-classroom tablet use can facilitate critical discussions around the integration and impact of these devices in the educational context, from a design and educational point of view.

Humans have represented data in many forms for thousands of years, yet the main sensory channel we use to perceive these representations today still remains largely exclusive to sight. Recent developments, such as advances in digital fabrication, microcontrollers, actuated tangibles, and shape-changing interfaces offer new opportunities to encode data in physical forms and have stimulated the emergence of 'Data Physicalization' as a research area. The aim of this workshop is (1) to create an awareness of the potential of Data Physicalization by providing an overview of state-of-the-art research, practice, and tools and (2) to build a community around this emerging field and start to discuss a shared research agenda. This workshop therefore addresses both experienced researchers and practitioners as well as those who are new to the field but interested in applying Data Physicalization to their own (research) practice. The workshop will provide opportunities for participants to explore Data Physicalization hands-on, by creating their own prototypes. These practical explorations will lead into reflective discussions on the role tangibles and embodiment play in Data Physicalization and the future research challenges for this area.

Text mining and information visualization techniques applied to large-scale historical and literary document collections have enabled new types of humanities research. The assumption behind such efforts is often that trends will emerge from the analysis despite errors for individual data points and that noise will be dominated by the signal in the data. However, for some text analysis tasks, the technology is unable to perform as well as domain experts, perhaps because it does not have sufficient world knowledge or metadata available. Yet, the advantage of language processing technology is that it can process at scale, even if not perfectly accurately. Geo-locating literary works is one example where human expert knowledge is invaluable when it comes to distinguishing between candidate works. This was the underlying assumption in Palimpsest, an interdisciplinary digital humanities research project on mining literary Edinburgh. From the outset, the project adopted an assisted curation process whereby the automatic processing of large data collections was combined with manual checking to identify literary works set in Edinburgh. In this article, we introduce the assisted curation process and evaluate how the feedback from literary scholars helped to improve the technology, thereby highlighting the importance of placing humanities research at the core of digital humanities projects.