Tuesday 05 December 2017 – Lunchtime Seminar with Dr Uta Hinrichs (University of St Andrews)

Speaker: Dr Uta Hinrichs
Title: Visualisation as a Process
Hosted by: Professor Luigina Ciolfi

Building visualisations has become a process that a wide variety of people engage in independent of their background. It is hard to imagine any discipline that does not use any types of visualisation as part of their practice or research. In parallel, a variety of visualisation tools have come out that target audiences outside of the sciences and the typical “knowledge work” domains (e.g. researchers in the humanities but also everyday people and even children). This raises questions around the roles that visualisation can play in different usage contexts, and the influence of visualisation tools at hand. In this talk Dr Uta Hinrichs will examine visualisation as a (creative, sometimes speculative) thinking process, rather than a means to an end. Uta will illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of different visualisation tool paradigms on the visualisation creation process and outline how an emphasis on “process” may open up new ways of discussing the role of visualisation across disciplines and contexts.

Uta Hinrichs is a Lecturer at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, specialising in Information Visualisation and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). She received her PhD in Computer Science with specialisation in Computational Media Design from the University of Calgary, Canada. Heavily drawing form fields outside of Computer Science (e.g., Design, Literary Studies, and Information Sciences), Uta’s research is driven by the question of how to facilitate insightful, pleasurable and critical interactions with information in physical and digital spaces, both as part of professional activities and everyday life. She explores this question through the design of visualisations and visual interfaces and through the study of their use in-situ. As a visualisation researcher Uta has been involved in number of collaborations with artists, historians, and literary scholars which have fuelled her interest in the role of visualisation as part of humanities research and practice. Her research has been presented and published at academic venues spanning the fields of Visualisation, HCI, Literary Studies, and Digital Humanities, as well as museums, libraries, and art galleries.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
TUESDAY 05 DECEMBER 2017
CANTOR 9137

See here for details of other seminars in the series.

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.