"Prior to the development of the idea of InfraVis, interest in visualization was growing at four universities simultaneously, including Chalmers, Linköping, Lund and KTH. The visualization centers at these universities saw an urgent need for data visualization support across all research areas. On the national level, Anders was leading a committee at the Swedish Research Council with the aim of evaluating the Swedish research infrastructures. Based on the evaluation, the Swedish Research Council pointed out that we needed to have research infrastructures built on humans, which is exactly what we at the visualization centers had in mind."
Anders Ynnerman
InfraVis Steering Committee Chair
"The first ideas for InfraVis came out of the realization that there were more potential collaborators in scientific application domains than the existing research groups in visualization could handle. Furthermore, many of the requests did not require new research in visualization itself. This triggered the idea of providing visualization competence as a service across the country."
In this interview, Monica Billger and Anders Ynnerman tell us about the mission of InfraVis, how the research infrastructure came to be and what feels most exciting and challenging in this early phase.
Nine universities as one - Taking data visualization to new heights
InfraVis pools visualization expertise from nine partner universities, forming eight nodes. This makes it possible for InfraVis to provide data visualization support in a broad range of research areas to researchers all over Sweden. This is also what makes InfraVis unique.
The node coordinators at each partner university were asked two questions: "How is your node contributing to InfraVis?" and "Does your node bring any special expertise?" Read their answers below and learn about the competence available at InfraVis.
The InfraVis logo consists of nine interconnected dots and the name of the research infrastructure. The logo uses a color gradient. Since “InfraVis” is a new term to the target audience, the InfraVis team specifically chose an easy-to-read font, to help people remember the name at once.
The logo is intended to represent the nine partner universities, and its shape derives from a data visualization work that connected the university location dots with lines on the Swedish map. The logo communicates the vision of InfraVis: The partner universities are joining forces to build a powerful, multifaceted and comprehensive data visualization research infrastructure to support researchers all over Sweden.
The InfraVis logo was deisgned by InfraVis UX Designer Yin He, in collaboration with the management team and steering committee.
Happening now
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Basics Workshop
23 November, 13.15-16.00
What is GIS? How can you use it to effectively communicate information within your research area? What general data visualization principles should you keep in mind while designing a visually stimulating map?
Hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala and Infravis.
Uppsala node sets InfraVis User Training in motion
In October, the Uppsala node held the first InfraVis User Trainings on the topics “Visualizing Data of Varying Dimensions” and “Visualizing Geographic Data”.
In the first course, the participants familiarised themselves with straight-forward techniques for making readable plots and graphs as well as more advanced techniques for dimensionality reduction. In the other course, the participants engaged with straight-forward techniques for plotting scalar data as well as more advanced techniques for plotting 3D geospatial data.
The Uppsala node will be offering more courses in the future.
Did you miss Lund Visualization Week?
Watch the one-minute video below for an overview.
Lund Visualization Week was a three-day series of presentations and workshops about data visualization, held by the Lund node. Some of the topics included visualization of single-cell gene expression, identification of environmental disasters through visualization, using visualization to explore the relation between language use and motion as well as visualization with the help of Virtual Reality and Paraview.
