Many of the conversations about data that take place within organizations today manifest during meetings and presentations, where we find participants with different roles (e.g., presenter and audience) and multiple channels of communication. A few years ago, I set out to investigate the potential of new experiences for these scenarios beyond slide presentation tools, as these tools largely preclude the ability to interact with representations of data in a spontaneous way. The challenges associated with talking about data were compounded by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as what would have previously been a co-located synchronous meeting or presentation became a remote teleconference event, often shared asynchronously as a video recording. In this talk, I will present our recent work that aims to restore a degree of personal connection that I argue is essential when having conversations about data. The projects that I will describe suggest different combinations of multimodality, spontaneity, and interactivity: from a video-mediated embedded narrative experience for business intelligence dashboards to a new experience for live presentations about data inspired by the late Hans Rosling, in which we composite interactive visualization content over live video, whereupon a presenter can interact with the content via continuous bimanual hand-tracking. Ultimately, the goal of this talk is to prompt a consideration of visualization beyond techniques for individual data exploration and communication scenarios, with a specific focus on the opportunities for visualization when speaking to a live audience.


Bio:Matthew Brehmer is a senior research staff member of Tableau Research in Seattle, where he specializes in new experiences for interpersonal communication with and around data. Prior to joining Tableau, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, which followed his PhD research on information visualization at the University of British Columbia. In addition to his research work, he is also dedicated to connecting visualization research with practice: co-organizing the VisInPractice event at IEEE VIS and speaking at practitioner events such as OpenVisConf, the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, and the Tableau Conference. Learn more about his work at mattbrehmer.ca and connect with him online at @mattbrehmer or at linkedin.com/in/matthewbrehmer.