Challenges and Opportunities in Data Visualization Education: A Call to Action

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

'It's not their job to soldier': distinguishing civilian and military in soldiers' and interpreters' accounts of peacekeeping in 1990s Bosnia-Herzegovina

Peacekeeping operations throw the use of specialized military forces and the aim of accomplishing change in a civilian environment into contradiction. Organizations with cultures that facilitate warfighting have to reorient themselves towards achieving peace and consent rather than victory, making peacekeeping a process of constant intercultural encounters between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ as well as between ‘international’ and ‘local’. The force’s local employees, civilians necessary in the force’s military tasks, inhabited a particularly ambiguous position. Based on more than 30 oral history interviews with peacekeepers and local interpreters who worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper shows how four dimensions of cultural and bodily difference emerged from their narratives: uniforms, weapons, disruptiveness and training