Exploring and analyzing data become more challenging as the data grow larger and become more complex. If a picture truly can be worth a thousand words, then clever visualizations of data should hold promise in helping people with sense-making tasks. I firmly believe that visual representations of data can help people to better explore, analyze, and understand it, thus transforming the data into information. In this talk, I will explain how information visualization and visual analytics help people make sense of data and I will illustrate this idea through a number of examples. I also will describe my current research into visualization for investigative analysis. This project explores how visual analytics can help investigators examine a large document collection in order to discover embedded stories and narratives scattered across the documents in the collection.
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John Stasko is Professor and Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He received his B.S. degree in Mathematics from Bucknell University, and SC.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown. His primary research area is human-computer interaction, with a focus on information visualization and visual analytics.
