ABI-ONE ghc program v14.indd - Grace Hopper Celebration of ...

Invited Technical Speakers
Friday, sessiOn 9, 3:00 – 4:00 pm
reGency baLLrOOm V
Fernanda Viégas
Research Scientist, Google
From Politics to Art: Visualization as a Medium
Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite
in academia, business, and government. It was “serious” technology,
created by experts for experts. In recent years, however, web-based
visualizations — ranging from political art projects to news
stories — have reached audiences of millions. Meanwhile, new
initiatives in government, aimed at all citizens, point to an era of
increased transparency.
What will this new era of data transparency and expressiveness look
like — and what are the implications for technologists who work
with data? To help answer this question, I report on work into public
data analysis and visualization. Some of the results come from Many
Eyes, a “living laboratory” web site where people may upload their
own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations.
Political discussions, citizen activism, religious conversations, game
playing, and educational exchanges are all happening on Many Eyes.
Finally, I discuss artistic projects that complicate and subvert the traditional
notion of data visualization by highlighting its potential
as an expressive medium that invites emotion.
About Fernanda Viégas
Fernanda B. Viégas is a computational designer
whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and
artistic aspects of information visualization. She is a
research scientist at Google, where she co-leads the
visualization group with Martin Wattenberg.
Her fascination with the power of visualization to
spark conversation led to the creation of Many Eyes
at IBM, where she was a researcher from 2005 to
2010. The site is an open experiment in collective sensemaking and the impact
of data analysis on public debate.
Before joining IBM, Viégas’s research at the MIT Media Lab focused on the
visualization of online communities. She is known for her pioneering work on
depicting chat histories, email archives, and Wikipedia activity. Viégas’s interest
in the stories that people tell about these archives led to a series of visualizations
of personal, emotionally-charged data.
Her artistic visualizations have been exhibited in venues such as the New York
Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Viégas holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the Media Lab at MIT. She is Brazilian and
misses the year-round warm weather in Rio de Janeiro where she grew up.
76 Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology | Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing