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Vialab is led by Dr. Christopher Collins at Ontario Tech University. This site serves as a home for our research and news about the lab. Check out our Github for software projects related to our research and our Medium account to keep up with our blog. Details about our various research projects can be found on our Research page.

Research Blog

  1. Professional Differences: How Disciplinary Training Affects Visualization Task Performance

    by Ethan Duggan

    Empowering people across all disciplines and professions to understand their data is the enduring promise of visualization. When designing a visualization for a specific industry or discipline, visualization designers will consider the nature of the data and how it is used by that specific disciplin  ...Read More

  2. Parallel Tag Clouds: A Look Back at One of Our Most Influential Papers

    by Ethan Duggan

    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

  3. Effects of Multiple Visual Channels on Outlier Detection: Why animated scatterplots are not well suited for data discovery

    by Ethan Duggan

    Data visualization is the practice of mapping data variables to visual variables, or visual dimensions. Despite only having two spatial dimensions to work with on a normal screen, data scientists often seek to cram as many data variables as possible into a single visualization using other visual dim  ...Read More

  4. Visualizing Language Transfer Effects in Large Learner Corpora

    by Ethan Duggan

    Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is a research field that studies the process of learning another language. Language transfer effects occur when the learner applies structural, grammatical, or semantic rules from their native language to the language they are trying to learn. For example, a native  ...Read More

  5. Covid Connect: Enabling anonymous peer-based mental health support with artificial intelligence and visualization

    by Ethan Duggan

    It’s been well over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, prompting various measures from governments and private-sector entities alike. One of the first responses to the pandemic came in the form of wide-spread implementation of work-from-home and learn-from-home policies. Gov  ...Read More

  6. Visualizing sexual harassment in academia: How researchers conveyed the bigger picture behind the data without compromising the individual significance of the stories.

    by Ethan Duggan

    Sexual harassment in academia is an unusually overlooked component of the greater societal conversation around sexual assault and harassment. This is especially puzzling when you consider the intense power dynamics that exist in academic institutions, as well as the non-academic aspects of universit  ...Read More

For more posts from our research blog, check out our Medium Page.

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