lwu’s blog

on Algorithmic Designs for Nourishing ur Body

Jan 11, 2009
2 comments

(x-posted from Facebook.)

I'm going to start this note, intended as a draft for version zero of the Stanford BAN (Bathroom Activation Network, pronounced VAN ), with a story of Self (nod thx to EqualityCamp sF).

I grew up really picky about food, not far from the streets of New York, albeit picky in a way that better nourished the agro-industrial complex and my father's latent artherosclerosis. I identify as a supertaster, even though I have yet to double-check this through supralingual, visual inspection, but when I was younger, I used these powers tacitly and unknowingly for Ewil rather than fer Good, as I tried to find my foodie way through the intricacies of Chinese, American, Filipino, and Canto-American-Filipino-NY cuisine. That is to say, when I was younger (pre&teen yrs) I chowed down on anything which had the HFCS-bit--mountain dew and coke, hamburg buns and all manner of junk. I didn't grow out of being picky, but I grew out of (un)knowingly using food to abuse my body (at least in the mainstream way), and directed my picky- predilection to becoming a connoisseur of food, from peasant food pizzas (New York or Chicago? Been there, ate that :) to legit Kobe beef, from artisan breads to good ol' Salumi (Seattle) Salami. Needless to say, I wasn't vegetarian at the time, although I remember the time I was interning at Extreme Blue and had two vegetarian teammates (ethics and health- respectively) and the final fourth who kept Kosher hard (Jewnix-hacker) core. And of course some of my most amusing roommates have been militant vegans/veggies, or just vegan-eating vegetarians :) I learned hella lot more last year at Columbae, steeped in the culture of 70s era activism, where I spent six months leveling up as a bread-baker (after which I spent six months teaching/training myself into bad-ass shape), and learning as much as I could about these other aspects of food. I went to Slow Food Nation as a Youth Delegate (shout out to Miss Wires and Miss Gaines), hit up a Food & Fair Trade convergence in Santa Cruz, and started to master vegan-only cooking with help from a Vegan with a Vengeance, Isa, hailing from Teh Post Punk Kitchen. So, I'm still picky, I just try to transform that predilection toward making the world slightly better (read: sustainably delicious!) along the way.

Somewhere along the line, I started to discover how nourishing your body, both in spirit and in food, in training and in rest, also affects the mind. I learned about how Omega-3 fatty acids are essential to our brainy chemistry, and yet are missing from our Industrialized Western diets. I take O-3 fish oil pills from CostCo, but hope that one day when we stop factory farming our fish and our livestock, pills won't be the only way to get one's "O-3s". It turns out that as we start feeding our livestock things they shouldn't be eating--corn and each other--they eat less grass (for our leggy friends) and less krill (for our finny friends), both of which are rich in O-3s. Iowa corn farmers may be the most effective farmers in history when it comes to caloric output per unit spacetime, but there's something lost along that linear regression line. We feed corn to our livestock, who can't digest it and, to prevent them from dropping like [insert insect species] we (America) spend most of our antibiotics on our livestock to stay them from their corn-stuffed deaths. How screwed up is that? Anyway, I'm early up on this Saturday morning not only because I have conditioning practice in 45 but because I couldn't sleep much last night or the night before. At least it's not like that time over break when I stayed up three days, made myself crash by training hard / consuming livestock prepared at Sprout Cafe / watching "Wanted", slept three hours, and then stayed up another three days without trying to (actually, trying not to!). But still, I'm wondering if it has to do with how my Warrior Diet intersects with my vegetarian-ness this Terran quarter, and how both of those sacrifice food biodiversity and perhaps micronutrients such as vitamin B12... I don't know, but I do buy the theory/evidence which supports the use of controlled fasting (not starvation) to reduce inflammation, which makes me want to know more about how it might also manage inflammation-of-da-brain as well, which some posit explains the underlying mechanism of depression. Well, that's a long story to tell, but I'll get better at telling it, don't you worry :). It was supposed to be an intro to my summarized "Designs for Nourishing ur Body" but that guide will have to be cut short in the interest of time (practice in 40!). So here we go.

---

Designs for Nourishing ur Body If you want to keep it simple, listen to Michael Pollan (who paraphrases well-known NYU professor of nutrition Dr. Marion Nestle) when he writes: Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much. Marion Nestle also adds an exhortation to Move but Loco-Motion is beyond the scope of this lil guide :). Avoid the reductionist extreme of nutritionism, as we know so little about our bodies and yet so much at the same time. Worry about the big picture before you worry about the trees--the macro- and micro-nutrients and their relative compositions. That said, once you get a hang of Eating food, Mostly Plants, Not so Much, it doesn't hurt to learn a little about macronutrients (but don't obsess?), and a little about micronutrients. That tis my current philosophy, my idiolect-equivalent in idio-syncratic and idio-socratic terms, to keep it simple, but add in a few bits of my own. What are these bits? Eating Heuristics When in doubt, maximize Fiber, minimize Sugar. HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) is the high-order bit of junk food. If you avoid HFCS, you probably have enough money and/or wisdom to stay clear of the food-like items that pervade our culinary lives. Concerned about mental health? Seek out Omega-3. (Still researching the impact of Vit B12 on mental health.) Unless you're a Varsity-athlete Vegan, don't worry about protein... as long as you eat a diverse set of foodstuffs. Advanced Algorithms Eat like a Bodybuilder? 5-7 smaller meals. Max Fiber, Min Sugar. Eat like a Warrior! If you're devout enough, I do recommend trying the Warrior Diet. For the secular crew, I'm not so sure. Consider the application of Periodization Strategies--mesocycles and macrocycles--to your eating programs. Lance Armstrong('s coach) does this. As an aside, he also suggests that just 24 hours of carb loading that follow a short high-intensity training session in that final day before a tourney is as effective as carbo loading throughout the week, but that's a minor point I just wanted to remind myself to try out :) Okay kiddos, time to gear up for practice. Peas and love out!

tempeh reuben

EqualityCamp, a story from

Jan 4, 2009
4 comments

[cross-posted from an email I sent to a marriage_equality mailing list at Stanford]

Hi Amanda,

Thanks for the forward re: the EqualityCalifornia scorecard!

Yesterday at EqualityCamp (#eqcampsf on Twitter), I met an activist lawyer who has worked at Equality California, and talked to a number of other activists working on the CourageCampaign, at non-profits in the city and the East Bay, Berkeley students and ex-(Obama organizers), designers, techies, and even hackers planning to run a SuperGayDevHouse hackathon. (JoinTheImpact tried to show, but couldn't make it.)

In this email I just wanted to (not so) briefly summarize what seems to be going on with Marriage Equality activism/organizing statewide.

EqualityCamp, an Overview

Some sixty to seventy techies, lawyers, organizers, and (often newly hatched) activists gathered at Citizen Space yesterday (2009 Jan 3) for EqualityCamp, an unconferenced organized in the BarCamp style--an "ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."

After a brief introduction from some of the organizers, we introduced ourselves to each other and got to work self-organizing to break up into theme-based sessions. As the EqualityCampSchedule shows, attendees both wanted to learn from the past--"Secrets / Lessons from the Obama Campaign", and look to the future with technology platforms for organizing (Mobile, Geospatial Mapping, and modern Social Networks). We also discussed service as a way of unifying communities, how to work with Youth / Allies / liberal communities of faith, and how to organize in communities of color and the (Oakland) East Bay.

Dream Machine: Secrets of the Obama (campaign)

Learning from the past was one theme that seemed to recur, from honoring one participant who met his current partner before Stonewall and is still kickin' to listening as organizers involved with the Obama campaign told their stories and shared their lessons learned.

As I scribbled in my abbreviated notes from Camp Obama real-time blog post (hashtag #eqcampsf), Dan Ancona described three things that the Obama campaign did successfully:

1. A structure of "Empowered Accountability", wherein you don't just give people tools, you make them into Carpenters
2. You invest in and distribute / make accessible tools such as the BlueStateDigital-powered my.barackobama.com, which integrated with the modern Voter Activation Network (or "VAN")
3. Training -- both in the technology and on messaging (more on that later)

Camp Obama may have been a different experience and set of tools for a different point in time, but it's worth contrasting the Obama strategy that worked with the "No on Prop 8" organizing which did not seem as successful.

Camp Obama sessions were generally two days, involved 300+ people, and were designed to empower people and give them tools to be leaders in the campaign.

There were three key principles. Respect, Empower, Include.

Under the direction of long-time organizer Marshall Ganz (a top field organizer for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, now a lecturer at Harvard), the goal of the training was not to train people how to phonebank (as organizers did here and across the state for Prop 8), but to get people in a room and just let them figure out how to make a million phone calls. It wasn't just about making phone calls of course, as training was not just a machine for phone calls and GOTV but a "machine for dreams"...

What might a machine for dreams look like anyway? They probably don't have the answer, but here's what they did do.

Of the 300+ people, dozens of smaller groups were formed and met separately according to the following structure.

1. Find your voice. For the first half of the first day of training you had to tell the story of your Self. Why did you decide to be active? What brought you here? Why do you care? The story of self gives you your first tool to talk and engage people with authenticity not mass-produced political plasticity...

2. Find out what your leadership ability is.

3. Finding your team.

4. Finding your set of responsibilities and who/how you were accountable.

Many LGBT-rights activists, after and during the fact, criticized the No on Prop 8 phonebanking scripts and media messaging as both too rigid--we were not allowed to tell our own stories at all, and were actively discouraged from doing so--and too abstract. While it seems like a lot of time to invest in having people find and tell their own stories, it also seems to foster a sort of person and leader-driven culture rather than a voter-outreach phonebanking machine.

It was said that the Obama campaign realized that "California was more than an ATM machine"--people wanted to do more and were given the opportunity to do so whereas many would-be Prop8 activists were frustrated at being told simply to hold signs (which they found difficult to acquire, another opportunity for entrepreneurial change).

So what do we learn, going forwards? I think what we learned from Camp Obama was that it's "not about message discipline but about organizing discipline". Rather than telling people what to say or not say, we need to remember and re-tell our own stories, realizing that when we reach out "the story of Self is a two-way street", and to tell one-way, un-Self-driven stories is a path to messaging futility.

How then, do we organize and organize in a disciplined fashion? Beyond the principles of Marshall Ganz / Cesar Chavez and Empower, Respect, Include? I think it's worth looking at two elements to learn from, both the organizational structure (a hierarchy, really) of Camp Obama and the way data- / feedback- / option-driven social networking web sites were used.

First, even though Camp Obama was designed to empower, it still operated under a tightly defined structure, of accountability and responsibility. I think it's worth considering the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freeman 1970) and the Tyranny of Disempowering Structure at the same time, to find some fruitful middle ground.

Second, it's worth noting how the campaign and the tech-powered sites allowed people to chose how to leverage their own talents (do you want to fundraise or phone call? Travel to another state?) and to make it easy for people to volunteer with whatever time they have.

If you'd like to learn more about Camp Obama, there are presumably folks around who have gone to one, and it's probably worth some time revisiting how Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers have organized, with an eye to how we as Stanford activists and students can also respect, empower, and include each other as we work and live towards a better future.

On Messages and other kinds of Data

In the last section I focused mainly on the structural perspective of organizing, and now I wanted to share some thoughts on "messaging" and other bits of data. While I mentioned previously that it wasn't about message discipline but about organizing discipline, it's still worth sussing out how we should craft and design our own messages. Someone at #EqualityCamp said that "the best advertising is aspirational... not a message but an ideal" and by these accounts Prop8 messaging was far from aspirational in tone, not to mention how we were discouraged from engaging our own stories of self.

And who should we send these messages to? who should we otherwise talk to or engage? A key takeaway from the second session I went to, "Mapping & Data" was the importance and challenge of organizing voter file / activation data. After each election there is often a scramble for the data gathered during the campaigns, for data (collection / integration) is expensive and information is power. Access to the Voter Activation Network (VAN) is available on a sliding scale, but at the end of the day, it still costs money and organizations are reluctant to share their voter databases with others. Geocommons and Creative Commons this is not.

Dan's article on "Power to the Edge: Obama's California Field Operation from the Future" gives a taste of how some feel the "distributed and bottom-up... way that is the clearest example of what a post-broadcast, distributed and participatory democracy is going to look like."

While we still struggle to figure out what this means, as we tweet and self-organize, network and SMS, orgs such as the Courage Campaign (who helped to fund the defend equality camp t-shirt) and working towards a world where we marry BlueStateDigital social networking sites with VAN files, allowing hoi polloi to get to voter contact in just 3-clicks.

The impression I got was that data management is a tricky business, both politically and technically, organizationally and socially. Who owns the voter data we collect? Who has access to it and by what means? It's clear that future elections will be even more savvy in their information wars--2008 was just the start.

unity in the community?

Communities of Color / Unity within the LGBT community

There's so much to write here that I don't know where to begin. I didn't take as many notes on these last three sessions as, to be honest, I was fading a little there, but I think a few takeaways include "service as a way of unifying communities" and remembering that coalitions are not built organization-to-organization but person-to-person within those organizations. It's worth remembering in the campaign for Marriage Equality that there are other worthy fights out there, and if we don't have their back when the time comes, will they have ours?

As action items, people started to self-organize lists for queer service days, others started planning for EqualityCamp Oakland/East Bay (taking childcare and diversity more into account), and folks were reminded to keep their electronic messaging professional ("details matter"), and to provide two Calls to Action with each communication. Others learned about video production whilst still others planned a future SuperGayDevHouse.

I'm going to wrap up there and cross-post to my vox blog for posterity. Write or chat if you'd like to know more!
L2

Stanford Marriage Equality activism

Jan 3, 2009
1 comment

As told by Stanford blog posts:

No on Prop 8 Rallies & Phonebanks (Nov 1, 2008)

Stanford Students Plan Continued Protest Against Prop. 8 in Student Union (Nov 14, 2008)

The Fight for Marriage Equality: 30 days later (Dec 4, 2008)

Mapping

Jan 3, 2009
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JESSE COSTELLO-GOOD on Mapping -- from howsfvotes.com

#eqcampsf (today's EqualityCamp schedule)

Neighbor-to-neighbor / peer-to-peer is the most effective.

Reach out to your base, have then reach out to undecided / persuadable / "soft yes".

We need precinct captains.

Can we combine Voter File + Social Network + Geodata? How to ensure effectiveness?

"subsidiarity" is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest / owest / least centralized authority.

Jesse is demonstrating http://p8m.howsfvotes.com/ -- I wonder if this data is in the geocommons? Precinct lines are from 2006 State data, California data not as good as SF voter data.

ca voter connect

Dan on the Prop8 campaign:

No on Prop 8 didn't do iterative feedback with voter file (too expensive, just one firm that does it). CallFire was used, but didn't set up the roundtrip to VAN? Not just geography but lots of demographic data to get phone numbers?

Decile vs Clustering approach. Make the data available to end-user activists? O'Reilly Vote Data Hacking?

Progressive developer hacker list?

Access to VAN (non-commercial) on a sliding scale.

Voter connect mission -- reach out to communities of color.

How do you give people options for how to engage? For example, a vet that wants to reach out to other vets.

See Dan's "Power to the Edge: Obama's California Field Operation from the Future".

CourageCampaign -- neighbor2neighbor (BlueStateDigital married with VAN, we are the test), recruit Obama organizers. n2n is a social network, allows you to get to voter contact in 3-clicks.

notes from Camp Obama

Jan 3, 2009
1 comment

"Obama or straight people?" #eqcampsf

Dan Ancona: notes from RootsCamp.

What did the Obama campaign do?

1. Structure of "Empowered Accountability" -- make carpenters (organizer Marshall Ganz)

2. Tools: BlueStateDigital's my.barackobama.com & VoterActivation Network (the VAN).

3. Training -- tech&message training

[VAN was easy to use but not that easy, deployed Neighbor-to-Neighbor later]

Marshall Ganz- get people in a room and let them figure out how to make a million phone calls. share dreams & strategy. not just making phone calls, but a "machine for dreams".

Mike Bonin

Why is Camp Obama different? Experience and a set of tools in a certain point in time. We're at a different point now...

Were generally two days, 300+ ppl, designed to empower people & give them tools to be leaders in the campaign.

Respect, empower, include.

"California was more than an ATM machine"--people wanted to do more--they became the phonebank or were sent elsewhere.

Structure:

1. Finding your voice. (first half of first day, tell the story of Self. why did you decide to be active? gives you your first tool to talk.)

2. Finding what your leadership ability was.

3. Finding your team.

4. Finding what your set of responsibilities were and who/how you were accountable.

See

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman (1970).

mashup Camp

Nov 18, 2008
1 comment

I went to day two of Mashup Camp today -- the "Unconference" for the "Uncomputer" -- held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I missed the panel discussion on "Making the Case for Mashups in Business", but organized my own Unconference Discussion #1, which I titled "Interactive Data Integration, Foraging for Web Services, and novel Human-map Interaction Design: Taking Map Mashups beyond Pushpins".

After briefly demo'ing d.mix, I gave my newer map design research pitch, and chatted about the use of maps on kidsdata.org. Someone pointed out that when it comes to digital cartography, there seems to have been a similar trend in the analog/digital typesetting industries, this sort of two-steps-forward but one-step-back push and tug when it comes to digitization and the loss of previously accumulated knowledge.

Alec also pointed me to tonight's WebMapSocial, where folks talked about OpenLandmark.com (which seems to have been broken all day) and Skout.com, a mobile dating site. I also met the person who had emailed me about the upcoming OpenStreetMap mapping party here in the Bay which I'll have to miss (going to a tourney in Oregon...) this weekend, and chatted for a while with an investor who works with CloudMade...

Camp

Over lunch, I chatted about sustainable foods with Rajesh from SearchYogi (how might we support data mining for the people to enable personal health decision analytics re: food), Ash from Medgle (and his new Healthy Me?), and a fellow about leveraging Recipe metadata in search (see Google Base recipe functionality).

Fred Jung (sp?) from GOOG talked about GOOG's new GGroundOverlay and GTileLayer APIs, and reminded me that legal issues probably prohibit them from doing much interesting when it comes to selective de-emphasis / re-design of map tiles.

After that, it was time to peace out!

Mobile California Proposition Guide

Nov 1, 2008
1 comment

During a phonebank rally today, I hacked together an IUI / iPhone-based "Mobile California Proposition Guide."

As you stand on line on Election Day, please take a few seconds and skim through the propositions which matter most to you!

CA Proposition iPhone guide

1 comment

Rock the Vote, yes We Can.

Grand Challenges in Vis

Oct 22, 2008
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What are the Grand Challenges in (Info)Vis? was the topic for a panel earlier this week, feat. Georges Grinstein, Tamara Munzer, and Daniel Keim.

I won't resummarize here, but Tamara made a call for a vision of "total political transparency" as a problem that is infovis-complete, but many of us agreed we're far far away from that. Sure, we have the Sunlight Foundation and other efforts, but we're still drowning in a sea of data, full of schema borne in different oceans.

From a Grand Challenge perspective, InfoVis panelists often cited scalability and data integration as large concerns, but didn't unpack scalability in any way at all. I think from my perspective, we're at a point now where it's not that the number of data dimensions (dimensionality) is growing without bound, but rather that the number and size of heterogenous data sets is growing faster than our ability to make sense of them.

Traditional InfoVis or even Vis assumes you have a data set that may grow and get larger, rather than envisioning a world in which you have an ecology of data producers and consumers, schemas and lack thereof, bad data and missing data and the like.

Alon Halevy made mention over the summer of OpenII, an Open Source Information Integration suite, and there are efforts such as Freebase which try to collabo/crowd organize the world's data, but I think even for the space of Vernacular Visualizations, of spatial mapping and timelines, of health / finance and politics, we're far from a world where we can explore the world's heterogenous data space to make sense of it, and communicate subset views of the space to others.

Ah well, time to get to work :)

InfoVis 2008

Oct 22, 2008
2 comments

InfoVis 2008 wrapped up yesterday, here in Columbus OH, and I have to say that the conference slightly restored my faith in InfoVis, the field and more specifically the research community that breathes the field alive.

But what is InfoVis anyway? In Stu Card, Jock Mackinlay, and Shneiderman's Readings in Information Visualization, Card et al. define visualization as

``the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition'' (p. 7, Table 1.1)

There are at least three things to note in this definition. First, that if the term "visualization" doesn't quite make sense, we can substitute "visual representations" and, at least to me, we can start to ground our thinking more concretely or perhaps more analogically. Just as words are textual representations, images embedded with some meaning can be thought of as visual representations, which can be chosen appropriately, manipulated, or explored in some way.

oh hai DFW (on the way to InfoVis 2008)

I'm not going to drill down into the differences between data, information, and knowledge, but I think the second point to note is that this definition focuses on the potential for "well-designed visual representations of data" to amplify cognition. At first, this may bias us towards thinking only of how vis. reps., let's say simple scatterplots, can help us as individuals to understand relationships between different data dimensions, but from a perspective of distributed cognition (see "Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization" in this year's InfoVis 2008 proceedings), the "unit of analysis should not be a human individual, but a cognitive system composed of individuals and the artifacts they use to accomplish a task".

From this perspective, we can think of the potential not of simply aiding analysis, but in aiding communication (see references of Communication-minded Visualization), whether simply unidirectional presentation or as a talking point which spurs discussion (and "social interaction").

Finally, I'm going to drill down on "data", noting that Card et al. define InfoVis (as opposed to general Visualization) as specifically "interactive, visual representations of abstract data". Card et al. divy up Vis into Scientific Vis (SciVis), vis. reps. of scientific data, typically physically based as opposed to Information Vis (InfoVis), vis. reps. of abstract data, nonphysically based data.

In fact, the InfoVis 2008 page suggests that the key challenge of InfoVis is in designing a "cognitively useful spatial mapping of a dataset that is not inherently spatial and accompanying the mapping by interaction techniques that allow people to intuitively explore the dataset". What I find problematic about this division is that it's hard to place everyday maps into this dichotomy. Maps are, of course, inherently spatial, and yet they are not always intended for scientific-minded analysis.

More generally, perhaps what made me lose faith in the field of InfoVis was the way in which it seemed the field "progressed" in the last ten years without having a clear impact on the world at large. I think part of that perception was assuaged when I heard Ben Shneiderman talk about treemaps and the decades it takes for ideas to be accepted (or not), especially ones that are directly user-facing (new machine learning algorithms go from Andrew Ng's lab to industry like 0-day exploits, they say). But beyond that, I'm mollified by more recent work on what some have called vernacular visualizations.

campus

Vernacular vis was a discussion topic at last year's Vis -- this year, not so much.

Earlier this year, F Viegas and M Wattenberg followed up with an Interactions article titled "Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization". From what I recall, they didn't try to unpack "vernacular", but simply seemed to chose the term as a nod to the design world dichotomies of low-brow and high-brow. But if we drill down further and look at how Vernacular refers to "the native language of a country or a locality" (so says Wikipedia, some semblance of the Vernacular Web), then we quickly get into the concept of diglossia, of high and low languages, of high prestige / the elite / the learned and of the everyday / quotidian.

In our Vispedia work this year, we primarily supported three visualizations: maps, timelines, and scatterplots, which seemed in that order used (commonly) and in that order compelling and, dare I say, vernacular.

So what makes a visual representation vernacular? Both the design world high/low-brow division and the diglossia sociolinguistic view suggest that not only do representations / media shift, hustle and flow back and forth into the vernacular over the decades (jazz, comics, and video games let's say) but that these forms are specifically situated in some socioeconomic context according to some frequency / pop.-populist distribution.

somewhere

While I think those dimensions are worth further analysis, seeing for example how NYTimes InfoVis design affects vis. literacy in the digi / technorati and beyond, I think if we go back to looking at what is being represented (and secondarily, for what purpose do we chose to represent?), we achieve some deeper insight into what may typically fall into ze vernacular.

I'll posit here that the more closely a representation maps onto our everyday dimensions of space and time, the more likely that visual representation falls into the realm of The Vernacular. Secondarily, the more a vis. rep. is well designed for highly-probable / quotidian STUs -- situations, tasks, and users (see Dr. Olsen's "Evaluating User Interface Systems Research" PDF), again the more useful a vernacular vis. might be.

Along these dimensions, academic InfoVis (with the exception of M Wattenberg's work, for example this year's Word Tree work or the beautiful geometries & aesthetics of Stacked Graphs, which both play with our common notions of textual and stacked-graph spacetime) tends to veer largely away from the vernacular, by dealing primarily with abstract, high-dimensional data. On the other hand, academic SciVis (and VAST, in a different way) veers away from more everyday STUs towards a service lens of scientists, engineers, and analysts.

Where does that leave us? Earlier this quarter I had planned out a schedule for a Vernacular Visualization workshop at Stanford co-hosted by Adobe and the Stanford Graphics / Vis labs, but peopletime constraints had us push back the date to some indeterminate time in early 2009. But I think Vernacular Vis has a bright future! from academics studying InfoVis for the People from a Comparative Media Studies (MIT) perspective to IBM ManyEyes researchers M Wattenberg and F Viegas, from a long history of digital and analog cartography to recent developments in making geospatial mapping technologies (at least on the consumer side, not quite the design side just yet) accessible to large fractions of the population.

I'm going to write a bit more later on how Vernacular Vis fits into the "Grand Challenge" view of the InfoVis world but for now I'll pause here and summarize. The history of academic Vis research has tended to split into two factions (now three, including analysis), one of scientific visualization (i.e., how do we see airflow over surfaces? MRI scan data?), and one of abstract information visualization (how do we see protein-protein interaction or social networks? how can we make sense of financial market data or large document collections?).

But just as hypertext researchers moved on right before the Web grew up and actually caught on, perhaps we're at a point where a more visual and interactive Web is growing up and the larger young/educated population is (?) more visually literate, and yet it's not clear where the last ten years of SciVis and InfoVis has to say towards having impact on that population. Still, with a more recent push towards more accessible / Vernacular Vis, towards communication-minded Vis and Vis as social spurs & catalysts, I'd like to say with some mild hope that we're on a decent, forward track :)