Data Visualization
This year was the beginning of the new visualisation programme, featuring various events to foster community engagement and skill development. We started with a launch event in January 2024, which was the opportunity for colleagues to identify priorities for the year across campus. From the input of the event, we devised a schedule of events for the year.
A key initiative is a monthly seminar series, varied between in-person, virtual and hybrid formats to maximize inclusivity. This series brings in researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines, promoting cross-disciplinary learning and innovation.
This year's event schedule included seminars in February, March, and April for learners and researchers, a workshop in June for all audiences, and a tools & techniques session in March for learners. There is also a hackathon planned for October. This year, the LIDA visualisation programme hosted two external speakers from the Universities of Lancaster and Oxford.
Highlight of the Events:
- March 5th: Introduction to Data Visualisation with Python.
- April 18th: Making your data visualisations more effective – external speaker.
- June 7th: Tableau Data Visualisation Workshop.
- June 14th: 3D and immersive visualization workshop.
- July 19th: Is information loss good or bad? - external speaker.
We hope the broad spectrum of people using visualisation have used the different opportunities and resources to advance their skills and knowledge in data visualization.
Catch up on our seminars
Case studies
- TGVE (Layik, Roger, Nik; GEOG)
- MAVIS (Roy Ruddle and COIs from COMP, MATHS, ITS, Design). This is a current EPSRC project https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/X029689/1
- Robin Lovelace’s REF2021 impact case study https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/impact/847d1191-7f25-46ba-a399-b481125edc8f
Turing Methods Research Challenge
- The Turing page for the TMCF is here: https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/theory-and-method-challenge-fortnights/navigating-garden-forking-paths-theoretical
- And the website I’m maintaining, where we will be posting outputs etc. is here: https://theory4ida.github.io/tmcf/
Who, what, when
Roger Beecham, with Cagatay Turkay (Warwick) are leading the 2024 Turing Theory & Methods Challenge (TMCF), hosted by The Alan Turing Institute. TMCFs are themed projects where around a dozen experts from across the world collaborate on some foundational challenge in Data Science and AI. The 2024 challenge seeks to address a version of the forking paths problem (Gelman and Loken 2013) in statistical practice – the fact that most data-driven analysis is open-ended and exploratory in nature. The project will develop theory and techniques that inject methodological rigour into data-driven research. The team assembled is interdisciplinary and includes world-leaders in Statistical Practice (Andrew Gelman, Di Cook), Communication (Jess Hullman), Visualization (Jo Wood) and Data Science tool-building (Hadley Wickham).
How and next steps
In the initial phase, TMCFs consist of two separate weeks in which the project team work together at the British Library. There was also an accompanying public lecture. Some early outputs from the first of these can be seen on the project’s blog. Post this, commentary papers and an edited special issue are in development and, working with Turing Research Software Engineers, an accompanying software tool.