Overview

In this non-traditional research, we explore a novel vision of the potential of arts to inspire aesthetically pleasing, fair and effective visualization of large data. We draw inspirations from visual arts (e.g., abstract arts) and depart from traditional visual abstraction schemes to investigate novel abstractions that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also galvanize end users to explore large data interactively. The rationale for pursuing this direction is aesthetics and engagement are closely associated with music and arts. Integrating them with computational paradigms pave the way to address the limitations of many existing visualization schemes which are not aesthetically pleasing or engaging. Specifically, our vision attempts to carve out a substantially new research topic that blends two orthogonal fields, namely visual arts and computer science (data visualization), to address the existing limitations of making sense of large data.

Current Work

Currently, we are exploring a visualization abstraction for online social discussions. We have built a novel system called Kandinsky Mobile, a mobile device-based interactive artwork that generates and displays the social discussion landscape associated with a social media post using a collection of colorful circles and concentric circles. It draws inspiration from the famous abstract geometric art forms of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Intuitively, a circle and a concentric circle represent a social comment and a collection of comments in a discussion thread, respectively. The system aims to facilitate user-friendly and effective understanding and visualization of large volumes of comments associated with an anchor post.

Publications

• Kandinsky Mobile: Abstract Art-Inspired Interactive Visualization of Social Discussions on Mobile Devices. Castillo Clarence Fitzgerald Gumtang, Sourav S Bhowmick. In ACM MM, Chengdu, China, Oct 2021 (Interactive Arts Track).
• KANDINSKY: Abstract Art-Inspired Visualization of Social Discussions. Christina Liu, Sourav S Bhowmick, Adam Jatowt. In ACM SIGIR, Paris, France, July 2019 (Demo).