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Header image: visualizations of climate change, US food insecurity, and civilian casualties in the war in Yemen

When: Monday, October 23, 2023: 9:00 AM-12:00 PM AEDT (UTC+11)
Where: VIS 2023, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Melbourne, Australia
Contact Us: vis4good-org@googlegroups.com, @vis4good

Welcome

We are proud to announce the third Workshop on Visualization for Social Good to be held as part of IEEE VIS 2023. The goal of this workshop is to:

provide a central venue within the IEEE VIS community for surfacing work that critiques, defines, or explores the impact of data visualization on society in order to build just and equitable futures.

Data is an inescapable part of our lives: it guides commerce, government, and technology, and increasingly determines what lives we can (or cannot) live. Data visualization has a special place within this emerging, data-driven, order: as a tool to inform or persuade mass audiences, guide or enlighten the specialist, or give a voice to the unheard. We therefore pose the question: how can visualization, and visualization research, help us build the worlds we want? This theme, building just and equitable futures, is the motivation behind the third edition of our recurring workshop at IEEE VIS: Visualization for Social Good. Our workshop series has been successful not only at showcasing high-quality socially-minded visualization research from diverse voices, but also in starting important conversations around the role of data visualization as a force for good in society at large. We invite you to join our workshop and growing community on Visualization for Social Good, to navigate conversations about the role of data in human dignity and flourishing.

Schedule

Time (AEDT)	Title	Speaker
9:00-10:15	Paper Session 1
9:00-9:15	Introduction & Welcome
9:15-9:22	Empowering People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities through Cognitively Accessible Visualizations	Keke Wu
9:22-9:25	Q&A
9:25-9:32	The Good Life: visualizing the complexity of supported living for people with disability	Kate Sweetapple & Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic
9:32-9:35	Q&A
9:35-9:42	Beyond English: Centering Multilingualism in Data Visualization	Noëlle Rakotondravony
9:42-9:45	Q&A
9:45-9:52	From Flowchart to Questionnaire: Increasing Access to Justice via Visualization	Bei Wang
9:52-9:55	Q&A
9:55-10:02	Visual Salience to Mitigate Gender Bias in Recommendation Letters	Emily Wall
10:02-10:05	Q&A
10:05-10:12	Open Questions about the Visualization of Sociodemographic Data	Florent Cabric
10:12-10:15	Q&A
10:15-10:45	Break
10:45-12:00	Paper Session 2 + Keynote
10:45-10:52	Supporting Mathematical Education with Interactive Visual Proofs	Moritz Weckbecker
10:52-10:55	Q&A
10:55-11:02	Bridging the Divide: Promoting Serendipitous Discovery of Opposing Viewpoints with Visual Analytics in Social Media	Narges Mahyar
11:02-11:05	Q&A
11:05-12:00	Keynote	Sheelagh Carpendale
12:00	Closing Remarks

Call for Papers

We as designers, researchers, and technologists, have many opportunities ahead of us, as laid out in aspirational plans like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering, and the NSF 10 Big Ideas. Yet, as the “techlash” continues, we are also seeing how technology has the power to magnify inequality, injustice, or other societal ills.

With the power that comes with collecting, interpreting, and communicating data in visualization, there is naturally a social responsibility. To do good and avoid harm, we should make our values as a field explicit, criticize and critique the work we do that has a potential for harm, develop a pedagogy around the socially responsible design and use of visualization, and develop good patterns for fruitful collaboration with stakeholders working on key societal problems.

To that end, we are soliciting work that deals with the social impact of visualization work. In order to focus the goals of our workshop, provide inspiration to potential attendees or submitters, and to reflect on the pressing issues of contemporary importance, we propose the following theme for the 2023 workshop: building just and equitable futures.

Some potential questions of interest include:

How can we adapt our ways of teaching, designing, or intervening in the face of imminent widespread societal, technological, or environmental change?
What audiences are included or excluded in our visualizations? How can data visualization be used to empower marginalized communities?
What role can data visualization play in promoting transparency and accountability in public and private sector decision making, especially as decision-making becomes increasingly automated and data-driven?

Contributions

Potential contributions might include (but are not limited to):

Design studies, “collaboration journals,” or other best practices for visualization work in domains with high social impact. Examples include:
Public health, development, and sustainable growth
Inclusivity, accessibility, and disability rights
Diversity, racial equality, and gender equality
Sustainability, ecology, and environmental activism
Explorations of design considerations for visualizations for mass audiences or policymakers. Examples include:
Building statistical or visualization literacy and fluency
Persuasion, misinformation, and deception
Accessibility
Critiques, manifestos, or provocations around social or ethical responsibilities in visualization design or research

Consult our resources page, 2021 workshop, 2022 workshop for sample works.

Submissions

Papers will be up to four pages, plus up to one page of references, in VGTC two-column format. Authors may elect to have their paper included archivally, or, per the authors’ request (e.g., for in-progress work), to have the work be presented but excluded from formal conference proceedings. The deadline for paper submissions is July 03, 2023.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: ~~July 3, 2023~~ July 10, 2023 (no separate abstract deadline)
Notification: August 1, 2023
Submission of Camera-Ready Final Version: August 15, 2023

All deadlines are at 11:59pm (23:59) AoE Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Keynote

Sheelagh Carpendale head shot — Sheelagh Carpendale
Computer Scientist, Professor, Artist

Keynote Title: Tilting at Windmills

The focus of this talk will be on the struggles of starting our latest project. Recently, in our efforts to take a positive human-centred approach, we decided to take on just a few of the UN’s research priorities: 1) how can digital technologies be harnessed to promote social cohesion while ensuring no one is excluded?, 2) how can policy solutions promote the well-being of informal workers and ensure their long-term economic equity?, 3) how can recovery efforts from emergencies help eliminate pre-existing social inequities in order to enhance the resilience of communities? In our words, our intentions are – to create effective tools to track and demonstrate the societal and economic benefits of the local community based arts, to enable evidence-based policy that supports and grows the community arts. In particular Indigenous, youth and LGBTQ communities, are remarkably under-resourced and under-supported, with an unsustainably high level of reliance on volunteers. Lack of economic policies based on real, community-based data undermines the ability to effectively support sustainable community livelihoods and well-being. We will enable pluralistic, community-inclusive, evidence-based economic policies to better support sustainable economic development and diversification. We will leverage data visualization as a co-creative data empowerment process with and for communities to better support community members in collecting, understanding and communicating data for the purpose of evidence-based economic policy development.

The questions now are – can we really do this? How much do we have to un-learn to discover new ways?

BIO: Sheelagh Carpendale is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University. Her many awards include: IEEE Visualization Career Award, NSERC STEACIE (a Canadian Top Science Award); a BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television Arts – similar to an Oscar in USA), two Best Supervision awards. She is also a Fellow Royal Society of Canada and is in the IEEE Visualization Academy and the ACM CHI Academy. Her research focuses on information visualization, interaction design, and qualitative empirical research. By studying how people interact with information in work and social settings, she works towards designing more natural, accessible and understandable interactive visual representations of data. She combines information visualization and human-computer interaction with innovative new interaction techniques to better support the everyday practices of people who are viewing, representing, and interacting with information.