In about…. one hour, I’ll be defending my Master’s thesis. I’m really looking forward to the opporunity to discuss my research with a group of interesting people and hear their thoughts on the work that I’ve done. Here’s to the summit bid!

- From PantherModem@Flickr

The following is the abstract for my MSc. thesis titled Lark: Using Meta-visualizations for Coordinating Collaboration. Unfortunately, university regulations state that thesis abstracts must  be no more then 150 words, and this one is well over 400. So, before this passage gets significantly reduced, here’s the extended version of what my thesis is about.

Real-world information continues to grow in size and complexity, making the analysis and interpretation of this data an ever increasing challenge. Both information visualization and collaborative team work have been suggested as important factors in addressing these information complexity challenges. Information visualization has the potential to provide different ways of examining and exploring the data. Collaborative data analysis can combine the analytic power of multiple individuals, with the possibility of including varying types and levels of expertise, potentially leading to increased quality of solutions and discoveries. However, while considerable research is being conducted in both the areas of  Information Visualization and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), comparatively less research examines the interplay between them. This is especially true for co-located collaborative scenarios.

In this thesis I focus on supporting small groups of people working together in a synchronous co-located environment who make use of information visualizations in their analysis process. Within this space I am particularly interested in mixed-focus collaboration—team work characterized by frequent changes in collaboration styles, which span the range from loosely coupled, individual work to closely coupled, group work. To facilitate mixed-focus collaboration, I investigate how to support changing collaboration styles within a collaborative information visualization workspace. To this end, I identify three concepts—temporal flexibility, spatial flexibility, and scoped interaction—which play an important role in this type of work scenario.

These concepts form the basis for my research challenges and structure the design and implementation of Lark: a coordinated multiple views visualization environment where the relationships and connections between individual views are illustrated through an integrated meta-visualization. The meta-visualization is modeled after the visualization pipeline and provides several distinct stages in which group members can coordinate their interactions–these stages are identified as Collaboration Coordination Points (CCPs) Making the relationships and connections between the individual views visually explicit supports workspace awareness and the CCP can help empower group members with the freedom to work in concert or independently. Furthermore, Lark shows how a coherent visualization collaboration interaction environment with direct visual and algorithmic support for the coordination of data analysis actions over shared large displays.

In this thesis I present a novel approach to the coordination of interactions between multiple people working together in a co-located collaborative visualization environment. The coordination of interactions can help facilitate mixed-focus collaborative work by supporting both individual and group work, and the transitions between these different levels of collaborative coupling. By investigating the synergy of information visualization and collaborative team work, this thesis demonstrates promising strategies for addressing present day information complexity challenges.

While working on the literature review for my thesis, I came across a paper concerning “visualization pipelines” which is widely cited in the scientific visualization community. The article is part of a book, published in 1990, and proved to be difficult to locate online. The friendly people at the U of C library where able to track this one down for me–interlibrary loans strike again!–and to avoid you the trouble, here is the article.

R.B.Haber and David A. McNabb, “Visualization Idioms: A Conceptual Model for Scientific Visualization Systems“, Visualization in Scientific Computing, IEEE, pp 74-93, 1990.