Learning to play the piano is a deeply rewarding journey, but it comes with a notoriously steep hurdle: sight-reading. Sight-reading is the ability to read and play a piece of sheet music fluently on the first look, much like reading a book out loud in your native language. While essential  ...Read More

Readers often find themselves lost in the sprawling geography of a great novel. While authors use real-world locations to set the scene, following a story that jumps between cities or across continents can be a challenge for even the most attentive reader. As Franco Moretti discusses in his work  ...Read More

Anyone who has tried learning a new language on an app has likely memorized phrases like “The apple is red” or repeated drills until their eyes glazed over. Conventional language learning platforms (such as Duolingo and Memrise) have seen massive adoption, but they typically rely on pre-determined  ...Read More

We’ve all been there: you’re trying to use a new piece of software, but the buttons don’t make sense, the data looks like a confusing mess, and you’re starting to feel your blood boil. Usually, computers are oblivious to our “human” moments. They sit there silently while we get more and more  ...Read More

In this blog post, we take a look back at an older paper of ours titled Parallel Tag Clouds to Explore and Analyze Faceted Text Corpora, and explore how it has influenced data visualization research since it was published. Parallel Tag Clouds was presented at the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics  ...Read More

We all take the single-line search bar for granted. You type in a few keywords, hit enter, and instantly get millions of results. But this familiar model relies on a major assumption: it presumes you already know exactly what you are looking for. For researchers in the humanities and social  ...Read More

This year at the IEEE VIS Conference (Oct 19–25), members of the Ontario Tech University visualization research group Vialab will be at the Vancouver Convention Centre to present research results across the entire spectrum of conference events. Starting on Saturday, visiting researcher Tommaso Elli  ...Read More