Just a few small updates this week…

The team had a fantastic in-person set of meetings arranged for last weekend.  The plan was to meet with our scientific collaborators, as well as hold a consultation session with  Margaret Burnett, an OSU professor & UI expert, about the direction of VISTAS’ UI work.  Unfortunately at the last minute a snowstorm hit Corvallis, so the retreat was cancelled.

The VISTAS reading group read and discussed a really interesting paper called Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualization (Robert Kosara).  The author discusses the use of visualization imagery to compose an overall story to stakeholders, as well as the role of visualization in exploration of data relations.  Oftentimes the quality of a visualization is judged only atomically, so it was interesting to get a more holistic view of presentations and how they can compose visualizations to present an argument.

I sent the development team my rough roadmap of UI feature implementation, and got some really good feedback from the lead developer.  A couple of things that I thought were low-hanging fruit really aren’t, so I’m having to revise a bit.

Not much else going on… just need to buckle down and code!