More Things To Do at VIS: BELIV, VisLies, Social Media Meetup, Etc.

For next week’s IEEE VIS conference, here are some more pointers to things that I think are worth checking out in addition to my previous list. This includes a few of the major events as well as some meetups you might otherwise have missed.

VIS now has a very extensive virtual event website that contains the program, preview videos and abstracts papers and most events. Once you register, you also get access to their Discord server, which is where all of the discussion will happen. If you haven’t used it before (I haven’t), it looks a lot like Slack.

The IEEE VIS Twitter account has also been busy tweeting short summaries of all the papers with links to materials. If you missed it, it’s worthwhile to scroll back through and check out the ones you’re interested in.

Sunday: BELIV

BELIV is always an interesting event if you’re looking to learn more about the thinking around visualization and evaluation. The keynote by John Burn-Murdoch, who has been doing amazing work covering COVID-19 at the Financial Times, should be particularly interesting. BELIV takes place all day Sunday, which of course collides with VisComm. But you can watch the keynote and morning sessions and then head over to VisComm!

Tuesday: VisLies

VisLies has been around for many years, and has been a lot of fun. The idea is to find bad examples of visualizations, but then to understand what went wrong. It’s both a fun event and very educational. It takes place 1:40pm-3pm MDT on Tuesday, October 27.

Wednesday: Publish or Publicize (i.e., Social Media) Meetup

I’m organizing a meetup on Wednesday at 1:40pm MDT, 10 minutes after the end of the last session (in other time zones, that will be 12:40pm PDT, 2:30pm CDT, 3:40pm EDT, and 9:40pm CEST). Here’s what I proposed it will be about:

Publishing your paper is all good and well, but how does the rest of the world learn about it? What ways do you have to get even academic researchers to learn about your research if they happened to miss your conference talk? There’s a healthy (if small) visualization community on Twitter, but blogging hasn’t been so hot lately, and we haven’t really established much of a foothold on YouTube. Let’s chat about what tools we have to publicize visualization research, from old-school blogging to social media, podcasts to vlogs, and beyond (anybody want to start a vis TikTok?).

The idea is to cover all aspects of social media and publicizing your work on top of the basic academic publication. There’s no fixed program, we’ll just talk about whatever people want to talk about. I’m happy to share my experiences, but of course I also want to hear about what people are thinking about or already doing.

The meetup page on the virtual VIS website currently doesn’t have much information, though it does have the zoom link.

There’s a lot to see and do, so check out VIS! This might be the only time you can do that from the comfort of your home, and completely free!