Envisioning a Path to the Future: New SIGVIS Weblog

December 09, 2004

New SIGVIS Weblog - Send in Your Submissions

Welcome to our new SIGVIS Weblog. Information Visualization is a rapidly emerging field at the nexus of a spectrum of academic disciplines - transdisciplinary and for the 21^st century. Historically, the area of research has been ahead of its time, synthetic, traversing and recombining innovation from traditionally compartmentalized academic disciplines. This weblog will focus on visionary possibilities and historical trajectories of information visualization. We encourage submissions that are transgressive, visually colorful and imaginative with an emphasis on the 'image', 'visualization' and 'sound' and with regards to 'information'.

In one sense, Information Visualization combines mathematically oriented academic disciplines (computer science/information science) and 'outside of academe' areas, or right brain visual areas, to create new paradigms for 'visualizing information' for purposes of pattern recognition, knowledge visualization and, ultimately, better information representation. Hopefully, this weblog will develop as a generative forum for discussions ranging from visualized large information systems (i.e. library catalogs), to image and moving image retrieval, to new models of organizing information visually (i.e. search engines) to new paradigm models (i.e. video games) of information applications.

This weblog also encourages submission of entries regarding visionary possibilities of information visualization. With the increasing power of computers and combining front end graphic possibilities with back-end databases, information visualization augments human intelligence with computer power and expands the capabilities for human knowledge creation.

This weblog will explore better ways of seeing, envisioning information and providing visionary possibilities for new ways of working with 'information'. Submissions are encouraged and should take a more thought-out but brief 4-9 paragraph format. Topics regarding this area are open and can reflect upon where we have been, what we have learned or where we are going.

Hopefully, this weblog will begin to historicize the field in a larger information science and technology context while providing specific examples to initiate dialogue, ongoing discussion and debate. This weblog also invites ASIST SIGVIS members and nonmembers to brainstorm by opening larger visual trajectories and posing the needed challenges in envisioning the path to the future.

Ray Uzwyshyn
Co-Chair and Website Coordinator, SIG VIS