Visual Metaphors

Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara.
"Design Elements and the Perception of Information Structure."

IEEE InfoVis Posters (2009).  Best Poster.

Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara. "Preconceptions and Individual Differences in Understanding Visual Metaphors."
Computer Graphics Forum 28, 911-918 (2009).

My thesis proposal

Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara. “The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors.”
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 14, 1269–1276 (2008). Honorable Mention in Best Paper.

 

My thesis research is on the use of visual metaphors as a general framework for understanding how visual structure affects visualization use. 

 

 

Miscellaneous

UNC Charlotte thesis style for LaTeX

Cognition in Visualization

I am also interested more generally in the cognitive aspects of visualization use.  For example, how do different presentations of maps lead to different conceptions of space?  What does cognitive science imply for interaction design?  And how can we reconcile the visualization community's ideas about insight with insight's definition in cognitive science? 

Remco Chang, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Tera Green, and William Ribarsky. “Defining Insight for Visual Analytics.”
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Viewpoints.

 

 
Designs and Applications

 

Apart from my theory and experimental work, I try to bring a structural perspective to visualization design and evaluation.  Here are some of the design and application projects to which I've contributed.

Robert Kosara, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, F. Joseph Mako III, Jonathan Miles, and Kam Tin Seong. "Parallel Sets in the Real World: Three Case Studies."
IEEE InfoVis Discovery Exhibition (2009).

Dong Hyun Jeong, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Brian Fisher, William Ribarsky, and Remco Chang.
"iPCA: An Interactive System for PCA-based Visual Analytics"

Computer Graphics Forum 28, 767–774 (2009).

Small Projects

Forked Parallel Sets
Mixed categorical and continous data to analyze dimensional relationships

Blob Networks
Categorical data as a network