Miriah Meyer
Troubling Visualization
When: 14th Feb., 10h00
Where: Amphitheatre, Bat 660 How to get to there?
Abstract
Visualization is at an inflection point where the field is filled with increasingly diverse research interests and approaches. But where we are also struggling to make our tried-and-true approaches to research answer an increasingly complex range of questions. How do we consider people’s affective, emotional, and subjective relationships to data and visualization? How do we design novel visualizations in an increasingly complex and uncontrollable technology landscape? What are our ethical responsibilities to our collaborators, our participants, and each other? In this talk I’ll argue that it is time to trouble the foundational perspectives we hold around how we, as researchers, make sense of the world and design within it. I’ll talk about new perspectives we are working with in the Vis Collective at Linköping University, and the myriad of research opportunities they are opening us to.
Bio:
Miriah is a professor in the Division of Media & Information Technology at Linköping University, supported through the WASP program. Her research focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping people make sense of complex data, and on the development of methods for helping visualization designers make sense of the world. She obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at LiU she was an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a member of the Vis Design Lab in the Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute.
Miriah has received numerous awards and recognitions for her work including being named a University of Utah Distinguished Alumni, both a TED Fellow and a PopTech Science Fellow, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, and included on MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of the top young innovators. She was also awarded an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune.