Visual analytics: The role of design and art in the emerging field of big data

Driven by the increasing complexity of data sets the need for sophisticated analytics algorithms coupled with visualization of both data and information is growing exponentially in every discipline and industry. Artists, designers and visual thinkers have an important role to play in the presentation and interpretation of data. The Visual Analytics Lab (VAL) at OCAD University is a preeminent research lab for innovation and training in information and scientific visualization and visual analytics. As well as its perspective on the field, two brief case studies are provided, one for health care and the second for media navigation and analysi

Annual Report 2016-2017

The College of Computing and Digital Media has always prided itself on curriculum, creative work, and research that stays current with changes in our various fields of instruction. As we looked back on our 2016-17 academic year, the need to chronicle the breadth and excellence of this work became clear. We are pleased to share with you this annual report, our first, highlighting our accomplishments. Last year, we began offering three new graduate programs and two new certificate programs. We also planned six degree programs and three new certificate programs for implementation in the current academic year. CDM faculty were published more than 100 times, had their films screened more than 200 times, and participated in over two dozen exhibitions. Our students were recognized for their scholarly and creative work, and our alumni accomplished amazing things, from winning a Student Academy Award to receiving a Pulitzer. We are proud of all the work we have done together. One notable priority for us in 2016-17 was creating and strengthening relationships with industry—including expanding our footprint at Cinespace and developing the iD Lab—as well as with the community, through partnerships with the Chicago Housing Authority, Wabash Lights, and other nonprofit organizations. We look forward to continuing to provide innovative programs and spaces this academic year. Two areas in particular we’ve been watching closely are makerspaces and the “internet of things.” We’ve already made significant commitments to these areas through the creation of our 4,500 square foot makerspace, the Idea Realization Lab, and our new cyber-physical systems bachelor’s program and lab. We are excited to continue providing the opportunities, curriculum, and facilities to support our remarkable students. David MillerDean, College of Computing and Digital Mediahttps://via.library.depaul.edu/cdmannual/1000/thumbnail.jp

Group Recommendations: Survey and Perspectives

The popularity of group recommender systems has increased in the last years. More and more social activity is generated by users over the Web and thus not only domains as TV, music or holidays are used and researched anymore for group recommendation, but also collaborative learning support, digital libraries and other domains seems to be promising for group recommendation. Moreover, principles of group recommenders can be used in order to overcome some single user recommendation shortcomings, such as cold start problem. Numerous group recommenders have been proposed, they differ in application domains which are specific in group characteristics. Today's group recommenders do not include and use the power of social aspects (group structure, social status etc.), which can be extracted and derived from the group. We provide a survey of group recommendation principles for the Web domain and discuss trends and perspectives in this field

Close and Distant Reading Visualizations for the Comparative Analysis of Digital Humanities Data

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

Geocaching: tracing geotagged social media research using mixed methods

This thesis explores the development of academic research with geotagged social media data (geosocial research) - an emerging computational, digital social research field - using 19 semi-structured interviews with scholars from diverse disciplines, participant observation at a geosocial research summer school and scientometrics. It asks: 'how can we study the development of geosocial research approaches through combining STS and scientometrics?' for five main reasons: to explore the diversity of computational social research; reflect on the ESRC's (2013) call to 'close the gap' between quantitative and qualitative human geography; contribute to methodological discussions in academic literature which call for combining STS and scientometrics; co-compose knowledge with distinct ways of knowing through mixing methods; and inform research methods curriculum development in the social sciences. Using new forms of digital data (like social media posts) is core to contemporary social science. Scholars from diverse disciplines conduct geosocial research. It thus provides rich opportunities to study how diverse approaches to computational social research develop. I combine STS and diverse scientometric methods as part of a single case study iteratively to explore how they can co-compose knowledge. The thesis contributes to literature which explores the STS - scientometrics interface. Most existing studies either reflect on diverse mixed methods approaches from theoretical or methodological perspectives, or provide worked examples using specific mixed methods designs. Conceptually, this thesis contributes by highlighting the need to develop and evaluate the affordances of computational methods for STS in light of the interpretative context - including research questions, characteristics of the studied research practice, theories and prior findings. I developed computational methods iteratively, in light of my theoretical and empirical knowledge about geosocial research. Empirically, the thesis first contributes by showing how diverse combinations of STS and scientometrics – including statistical and visual network analyses as well as descriptive statistics - can inform a single case study. Second, it offers three ways STS and scientometrics can co-compose knowledge by aligning their units of analyses, reflecting on how calculation acts inform qualitative analysis even when analytical units are not aligned, and using each method inductively. I combined STS and scientometrics to study practices through which geosocial research approaches develop - including collaboration, developing (sub)-disciplinary communities and methods' mediation of geosocial research. I also identified geosocial research approaches and compared them using mixed methods. Finally, I combined insights from STS and scientometrics to highlight the construction of my own analyses. Using mixed methods, the thesis argues that geosocial research is a collection of approaches rather than a coordinated community. I highlight fourteen practices that enable scholars to develop their approaches, including interdisciplinary collaboration; setting up distinct geosocial laboratories to experiment with geosocial data; reflecting on the data analysis process; and using local knowledge about spaces. I differentiate `social', `technical' and 'geographic' approaches, which differ in terms of the methods they use and spatial units they study. Finally, I illustrate approaches' heterogeneity - including their diverse computational approaches - and similarities, such as their urban studies focus

Content Creation in the Digital Economy: A Comprehensive Exploration and Investigation of Work Environment and Content Creators’ Behaviours

With the emergence and rapid spread of digital technologies, the world is undergoing a profound transformation. The digital economy that has evolved as a result has fundamentally changed and impacted every aspect of society and business, and it will undoubtedly change and reshape employment and work from various perspectives as well. Flexibility and autonomy have always been the strong attraction that the digital economy provides to workers, but behind this hidden truth is the strict control of platforms and algorithms. This thesis seeks to further deepen the understanding of working in the digital economy through a series of studies ranging from the broad to the specific, especially on the work of a particular group of content creators. This thesis contains four studies. Study 1 is a review paper that attempts to clarify the distinction between different concepts from the digital economy on a macro level. Studies 2-4 turn the perspective to a particular group of workers in the digital economy, the content creators. Study 2 uses two quantitative studies to theorise the characteristics of working on content creative platforms by developing a typology of these platforms. The third study was a systematic review to explore the power imbalance between platform algorithms and creators in content creative platforms. The fourth study employs a quantitative study that explores the impact of the platform work environment on the creators' behaviour from an individual perspective. This series of studies makes important theoretical contributions to the field related to employment relations in the digital economy context, especially content creative platforms, from both macro and micro perspectives. In addition, this series of studies provides practical implications for content creators, platforms and policymakers