Are We Making Progress in Visualization Research?
BELIV (Evaluation and Beyond - Methodological Approaches for Visualization) 2022 (to appear)
In this work I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what are we building towards, and are our existing methods sufficient to get us there? My respondents discussed several potential challenges for visualization research in terms of knowledge formation: a lack of rigor in the methods used, a lack of \textit{applicability} to actual communities of practice, and a lack of theoretical structures that incorporate everything that happens to people and to data both before and after the few seconds when a viewer looks at a value in a chart. Orienting the field around progress (if such a thing is even desirable, which is another point of contention) I believe will require drastic re-conceptions of what the field is, what it values, and how it is taught.
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