Assistant Professor in CS at Mount Holyoke College; PhD from UMass Amherst
I study and teach how to make data visualizations & computers work for real people.
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| Website: | https://www.alyxburns.com/ |
Really looking forward to attending #infoplus2023 next week!
I'll be giving a talk on Thursday about feminist theory & visualization memes titled "Yes, Yes in Yellow: Memes and What They Tell Us About (Queer) Use of Data Visualization"!
I'm excited to share our #CHI2023 paper! This was a collaboration with some rockstar undergrads Christiana & Ria, and my great mentors @evanmpeck & Narges Mahyar. It's also the last of the pieces of my dissertation and I'm so excited to see it out in the world. 😁
In it, we're asking: Who is a novice in visualization research, really?
Pre-print here: https://bit.ly/VisNovices
1/n
I'm excited to share our #CHI2023 paper! This was a collaboration with some rockstar undergrads Christiana & Ria, and my great mentors @evanmpeck & Narges Mahyar. It's also the last of the pieces of my dissertation and I'm so excited to see it out in the world. 😁
In it, we're asking: Who is a novice in visualization research, really?
Pre-print here: https://bit.ly/VisNovices
1/n
We wanted to answer two questions: How does the vis community talk about novices? & How are vis for novices evaluated?
To do this, we qualitatively analyzed all 79 vis papers which were published in "core" vis venues and used the terms novice, non-expert, layperson, or general public in their titles or abstracts.
2/n
We found that there aren't many clear definitions which make it ambiguous as to who is (not) a novice, but that researchers rely on things like job titles, proximity to STEM, and/or a lack of expertise, knowledge, or skills to define who is inside or outside the group.
3/n
We also found that despite the broad group of people who *might* be considered novices, the participants who represent them in vis evaluations are narrow: they tend to be people in their 20s, people from the United States, and/or students. They also tend to participate in studies which are focused on user experience or performance.
4/n
Reflecting on our results, we discuss how (1) ambiguity in who is or isn't a novice makes it difficult to tell how results apply across papers, (2) a focus on STEM means many vis readers are excluded, (3) WEIRD participants might mean we're misunderstanding peoples' experiences, and (5) vis for novices could benefit from a more diverse set of evaluation types.
5/n
I'm really proud of this work & I hope folks like it and find it helpful. The project was in part inspired by difficulty that I had figuring out who the audience of vis studies were. It was definitely eye-opening to see the patterns across the area & also somewhat sobering to see who is *not imagined* to care about vis or use vis in recognized ways.
(6/6)