On the last day of classes, December 4, the Duke community will have a very special treat: a visit from artist and certified medical illustrator Jennifer McCormick.  Jennifer has been actively exhibiting and speaking about her work for several years, including a recent TEDx talk at Wake Forest University and an exhibit at the Durham Arts Council.

In Jennifer’s work as a medical illustrator, she partners with attorneys to create visualizations that explain complex injuries and medical procedures to jury members.  In her fine art, however, she builds on the histories and x-rays of patients to explore “an opportunity for healing, hope, and acceptance.”  Her unique pieces transform the original clinical imagery of the injury into gorgeous, natural, holistic scenes.  In her artist talks, she speaks of “the power of intention” and “our forgotten superpowers” to raise awareness of the importance of art and spirituality for healing.

Jennifer will join us for the final Visualization Friday Forum of the semester.  It will be an opportunity for visualization enthusiasts, clinicians, medical imaging specialists, legal scholars, and those interested in the intersection between health and art to gather together for a presentation and conversation.  The talk will occur in the standard time slot for the Visualization Friday Forum — noon on Friday, December 4 — but the location is changing to accommodate a larger audience.  For one week only, we will meet in Duke Hospital Lecture Hall 2003.

The Visualization Friday Forum is sponsored by the Duke University Libraries (Data and Visualization Services), Duke Information Science + Studies (ISS), and the DiVE group. Jennifer’s visit will also be sponsored by the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine and Duke Law – Academic Technologies.

We are so excited Jennifer has agreed to travel to Duke for a visit.  Please mark your calendars for this event.  If you would like to speak with Jennifer about medical illustrations or the intersection between medicine and spirituality, please contact Angela Zoss.

Our third year of the Duke Student Data Visualization Contest has come and gone, and we had another amazing group of submissions this year.  The 19 visualizations submitted covered a very broad range of subject matter and visualization styles. Especially notable this year was the increase in use of graphic design software like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Inkscape to customize the design of the submissions.  The winners and other submissions to the contest will soon be featured on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

As in the past, the submissions were judged on the basis of five criteria: insightfulness, broad appeal, aesthetics, technical merit, and novelty.  The three winning submissions this year exemplify all of these and tell rich stories about three very different types of research projects. The winners will be honored at a public reception on Friday, April 10, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m, in the Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services (in the Edge).  They will each receive an Amazon gift card, and a poster version of the projects will be displayed in the lab.  We are very grateful to Duke University Libraries and the Sanford School of Public Policy for sponsoring this year’s contest.

First place:

Social Circles of Primary Caregivers / Tina Chen

Second place:

Crystal Structure of Human Proliferating Cell Nuclear Antigen (PCNA) for in silico Drug Screen / Yuqian Shi

Third place:

Deep and Extensive Impacts to Watershed Shape and Structure from Mountaintop Mining in West Virginia / Matthew Ross

Please join us in celebrating the outstanding work of these students, as well as the closing of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit, on April 10 in the Edge.

Calling all Duke undergrad and grad students! Have you worked on a course or research project that included some kind of visualization? Maybe you made a map for a history class paper. Maybe you invented a new type of chart to summarize the results of your experiment. Maybe you played around with an infographic builder just for fun.

Now is the time to start thinking about submitting those visualizations to the Duke Student Data Visualization Contest. It’s easy — just grab a screenshot or export an image of your visualization, write up a short description explaining how you made it, and submit it using our Sakai project site (search for “2015 DataVis Contest”). The deadline is right after finals this fall, so just block in a little extra time at the end of the semester once you’re done with your final assignments and projects.

Not sure what would work as a good submission? Check out our Flickr gallery with examples from the past two years.

Not sure if you’re eligible? If were a Duke student (that is, enrolled in a degree granting program, so no post-docs) any time during 2014, and you did the work while you were a student, you’re golden!

Want to know more about the technical details and submission instructions? Check out the full contest instructions.

On Thursday, April 17 and Friday, April 18, Duke University will host a visit from Francesca Samsel, a visual artist who uses technology to develop work on the fulcrum between art and science.  Francesca works as Research Assistant Faculty in the Computer Science department of the University of Texas at El Paso, is a Research Affiliate with the Center for Agile Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin, and is also a long-term collaborating partner with Jim Ahrens’ Visualization Research Team at Los Alamos National Labs.

Francesca will give two presentations during her visit.  A presentation on Thursday afternoon for the Media Arts + Sciences Rendezvous series will address the humanities community and present recommendations for work with scientists and visualization teams.  A presentation over lunchtime on Friday for the Visualization Friday Forum will describe a variety of collaborations with scientific teams and address the benefits that can come from incorporating artists into a scientific research team.

Francesca’s visit is sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS), with additional support from Media Arts + Sciences.  We hope you can join us for one or both of the presentations!

The second annual Duke Student Data Visualization Contest brought in another round of beautiful and insightful submissions from students across the university.  The judging panel of five members of the Duke community evaluated the submission based on insightfulness, broad appeal, aesthetics, technical merit, and novelty.  This year, the panel awarded a first place, second place, and two third place awards.

Each of these winners will be honored at a reception on Friday, April 4, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m, in the Brandaleone Center for Data and GIS Services (Perkins 226).  They will each receive a poster version of their projects and an Amazon gift card.  The winners and other submissions to the contest will soon be featured on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

First place:

Second place:

Third place (tie):

Third place (tie):

Please join us on the 4th to celebrate another year of exciting visualization work at Duke!

On Friday, October 4, Dr. Christopher G. Healey will visit Duke University to speak at the Visualization Friday Forum.

Christopher G. Healey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He received a B.Math from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. His research interests include visualization, graphics, visual perception, and areas of applied mathematics, databases, artificial intelligence, and aesthetics related to visual analysis and data management.

We hope you can join us at the Friday Forum!

On Thursday, April 4 and Friday, April 5, Duke University will host a visit from Dr. Christopher Collins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), where he directs The Visualization for Information Analysis lab (vialab). While at Duke, Dr. Collins will give two public presentations and will be available for meetings with groups and individuals. His visit is sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS).

Dr. Collins engages in interdisciplinary research, combining information visualization and human-computer interaction with natural language processing to address the challenges of information management and the problems of information overload. His publications, including the DocuBurst document content visualization system, have helped to open a new and thriving area of research in “Linguistic Visualization”. Dr. Collins has been awarded a Discovery Grant from NSERC, providing 5 years of funding for research on “Text and Multimedia Document Visualization”. His research interests include: visualization of natural language data, interaction techniques for information visualization (including multi-touch interaction), scientific visual analytics, and social implications of computing / ethics & philosophy of computing.

Dr. Collins will give the following public presentations:

There are also blocks of time in his schedule available for individual and group meetings. If you would like to meet with Dr. Collins, please contact Angela Zoss (angela.zoss@duke.edu) or Eric Monson (emonson@cs.duke.edu).

Select Research Projects

Exploring Text Entities
with Descriptive Non-photorealistic Rendering

Visualizing Semantics in Passwords

Bubble Sets: Revealing Set Relations with Isocontours over Existing Visualizations

Parallel Tag Clouds to Explore Faceted Text Corpora

VisLink: Revealing Relationships Amongst Visualizations

DocuBurst: Visualizing Document Content using Language Structure