Wednesday

Visual Analytics Education
Moderator: Jim Foley, Georgia Tech

Stu Card, PARC
David Ebert, Purdue
Alan MacEachren, Penn State
Bill Ribarsky, UNC-Charlotte

Visual Analytics is a newly-evolving field that spans across several more established disciplines. This panel will discuss how VA system developers and researchers are best educated at the MS and PhD levels.

The purpose of this panel is to begin a community dialogue on graduate education in the emerging and broadly interdisciplinary field of Visual Analytics (VA). Where does VA fit into the broader set of academic disciplines on which it draws? What is at its intellectual core? How should MS and PhD students be educated to become productive VA developers and researchers? We begin with an overview of several ways one might conceptualize the body of knowledge that is Visual Analytics, drawing on Illuminating the Path and an initial taxonomy developed by the UNC-C and GT Regional Visual Analytics Center. Next, we pose some of the questions that the panel is expected to address. But, we note that as with any fledgling discipline, the answers to these questions will be, at best, tentative. Only time and experience and experimentation will provide us with some confidence as to the adequacy of these tentative answers. Finally, we describe the Visual Analytics Digital Library, being developed by the Southeastern RVAC, designed to help educators teach and students learn Visual Analytics.