Isabel Meirelles Co-Organizes Second Annual Information+ Conference

Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - 11:30am

Professor Isabel Meirelles is responsible for co-organizing the second anual Information+ Conference, held in Potsdam, Germany, from October 19th-22nd. The biennial conference brings together researchers and practitioners in information design and visualization to discuss common questions and challenges in these rapidly changing fields. Information+ includes a variety of workshops, four keynotes, a two-day conference and an exhibition of historic information design, organized by the German Museum of Books and Writing. The event is hosted by the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. 

Learn more at http://informationplusconference.com/

Taste Graph: A narrative visualization tool for massive media data

Traditional newspapers are moving dramatically to digital publishing and data analytics in order to better understand their users’ behaviors, build their subscriber base, maintain their online readers, determine advertising placements. The goal is to deepen and diversify their revenue streams. For this purpose, VAL's Taste Graph research analyzes and synthesis the Globe and Mail data about their subscribers and their web-browsing habits, indicating connections between tastes.

Discovering affinities across different categories is a promising method of segmenting the audience within the context of media planning and potential advertising campaigns. For example, if someone shops for organic vegetables they might be more likely to shop to organic tea. Also, if data indicates close affinities between the categories of organic clothes and organic foods, it is reasonable that a purchaser of both organic vegetable and tea packs will be interested in shopping for an organic cotton shirt if they are provided with a choice to pick a shirt. As well, the people within the taste category  ‘organic’ could also be interested in certain types of drinks, types of shoes, and a sports travel lifestyle.

To establish similar taste correlations within Globe and Mail data, we follow a “narrative approach” that helps tell stories with the data by providing a smooth transition from raw data to communicating through data visualization. The tool we are developing supports the Globe and Mail marketing teams. Firstly, it provides an easy way to filter multiple sources of data and find relationships. Secondly, it shows patterns regarding Globe and Mail audience tastes in customized narrative visualizations. From these, the marketing teams could gain holistic knowledge about their audience tastes and see the impact of certain taste correlations or become aware of some hidden insights of interest regarding relationships between tastes. Thirdly, it allows Globe and Mail people to remain continuously knowledgeable about their business performance measures.

Our organization of the design space involves two types of narrative tactics: visual and structural. For visual tactics, we deploy several visual mechanisms that assist and facilitate the narrative. We chose a bubble chart, and grouped bar chart to illustrate, evaluate, and compare tastes, scores and engagement levels. Colour is then applied to different categories of advertisements to indicate degrees of divergence in tastes. We depend on navigation strategies as a structural tactic to assist the narrative. For example, we arrange the paths the viewer might take through the visualizations, and we make the visualizations interactive by including filtering, selecting, searching, and navigating of advertisement data. These strategies are tested and refined with Globe and Mail design and marketing teams and will then be audience tested.

Our visualization tool, in general, respects secure web application standards. Our goal is to provide the Globe and Mail with intuitive reports about the overall and manifold correlations of tastes of their readership and advertising audiences. Our proposed tool handles the complexity of massive and heterogeneous marketing data records and translates it into a communicative interface.

See a preview of TasteGraph from the IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee VIS2018 here.

Click here to see Ahmad Karawash presenting this research at the Ontario OAR Conference, May 16 2018.
Click here to view this project on SOSCIP's page.

This research was presented by Dr. Ahmad Karawash, Postdoctoral Fellow and Team Lead, and Sana Shepko at the Ontario Centres of Excellence annual Discovery conference on May 1st, 2018 (see below).
 

Image of interactive tool, showing a graphical comparison of universe vs. specific category's engagement with taste groups
Photograph of Ahmad Karawash and Sana Shepko attending Discovery 2018 conference to present research.
Friday, May 18, 2018 - 10:45am

DIVERGE - Digital Futures Graduate Exhibition 2018

Diverge
Thursday, April 12, 2018 - 6:00pm to Sunday, April 15, 2018 - 6:00pm

OPENING NIGHT
Thursday, April 12, 2018 - 6:00 PM

EXHIBITION CONTINUES
Friday, April 13th to Sunday, April 15th |  12PM-6PM

DIVERGE:

  1. To develop in a different direction.
  2. The evolution of different forms or structures in related species as they adapt to different environments.
  3. In a series, increasing indefinitely as more of its terms are added.

The Digital Futures Graduate Exhibition is an annual event, hosted by Graduate Studies at OCADU and our partners at the CFC Media Lab. The show features Master of Design, Master of Fine Arts, and Master of Arts thesis projects that encompasses a wide range of topics, including: augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and communicative domains, civic media, digital and electronic fabrication, digital art, educational video games, gesture technologies, information visualization, immersive audio-visual environments, participatory multimedia, performances, post-physical sculpture, therapeutic devices, video and more!

"Our students don’t just make things with emerging technologies - they think creatively and critically about how, why, and when we should use and engage with these ideas and tools- and when we should not. The artworks, prototypes, demonstrations, and performances in Diverge bring this research to life in a rich interactive format. We invite our colleagues from industry, fellow universities, art, design, and maker communities to come join us for this important and exciting exhibition." -Kate Hartman, Graduate Program Director, Digital Futures.

Exhibitors

Samaa Ahmed

Thoreau Bakker

Bijun Chen

Mudit Ganguly

Sara Gazzaz

Yawen Guo

Afaq Ahmed Karadia

Mahsa Karimi

Nadine Lessio

Ania Medrek

Katie Micak

Natasha Mody

Afrooz Samaei

Shreeya Tyagi

April Xie

Rana Zandi

Hammadullah Syed

Manik Perera Gunatilleke

DIVERGE is presented by:

CFC Media Lab and OCAD University

Venue & Address: 
49 McCaul St. Open Gallery
Website: 
https://divergedf.eventbrite.ca
Email: 
jpaglione@ocadu.ca
Diverge OPENING NIGHT