Library Visualization

Here we are, 20 days after my last #VizSpaces tour stop in Blacksburg, Virginia. In the interim, I’ve learned how much work awaits you after two weeks on the road with terrible hotel wifi. And there’s a lot more work to do in the near future. So I’ll keep this short and spare you my excuses because more analysis of my visualization spaces listening tour is to follow shortly. 

Here are some links related to my trip.

This is a map of the places I visited.

Chronologically, here’s where my blog posts about this visualization spaces listening tour start. Here are the rest of the #VizSpaces blog posts in reverse chronological order.

Here are some photos of the places I went (with a Google Pixel camera, by the way. Don’t expect miracles).

I had been maintaining a list of video wall installations in museums and academic buildings. When I met Bill Mischo at Illinois, I discovered he had a much more comprehensive list, which I’ve now appended to this public Google Doc. I’ll organize the list in the near future, and perhaps we can turn it into a community-maintained effort. Thank you, Bill!

I turned the trip meter over twice, for a grand total of 2229.4 miles in 11 days.

Please stay tuned for big news (soon!) that will continue the work I started on this listening tour of visualization spaces. I can tell you now that I will be producing an opportunity analysis for how academic visualization spaces could work together better to support our students and faculty.

This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to talk to and visit peers and thought leaders in a way that wouldn’t have happened without my award by our Friends of the Library. 

The last day of my trip was Friday, April 7. I woke up at the Red Carpet Inn in Blacksburg, Virginia and drove to the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech. It snowed on me. Twice! And the Moss Arts Center is another Snøhetta building, like our Hunt Library! 

The MAC also houses the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. ICAT has several facilities to support such endeavors, including the Cube which is “unique in the world...a four-story-high, state-of-the-art theatre and high tech laboratory that serves multiple platforms of creative practice by faculty, students, and national and international guest artists and researchers.”

My pictures of The Cube were pretty crummy (like with a lot of the dark places I was trying to shoot with my Pixel’s camera on this trip) so take a look at this video instead of mine:

Luckily, the timing of my travels just happened to coincide with a “playdate” that featured some student projects produced for the Cube facilities. I met with one of the co-instructors for the class, Immersive Environment Specialist Zach Duer. On a big presentation day for him, Zach agreed to meet me for lunch on very short notice. I’m afraid I spent more time explaining my long strange trip than hearing from him, and so I hope to follow up with Zach to hear more about his and his colleagues’ work. I was mightily impressed at how many people (mostly students, more than 80 because they had to fly the Cyclorama up in the air to accommodate the large number of people in the space) showed up for the playdate demonstration of the students’ projects.

I got a tour of the ICAT spaces, which also included another motion capture space (the Cube had such abilities), reinforcing the idea of 3D “data capture” that I saw at CMU and Indiana.

At the playdate, Michael Stamper introduced himself to me. He’s the Data Visualization Designer & Consultant for the Arts for VT’s library system...and a prime example of the kind of person on this trip that I was kicking myself for not discovering earlier but lucky to meet along the way. There aren’t that many visualization librarians! I’m currently working with Michael on trying to get some of his data visualizations onto our Immersion Theater.

I also met with Srijith Rajamohan, Computational Scientist at the Advanced Research Computing unit, where he and a graduate student demoed their HyperCube. Srijith is leading an internal investigation about existing visualization spaces at VT to help inform decisions about a future visualization space at the Newman Library there. Michael Stamper will have a role in those spaces. I look forward to following that project!

I did not find until my link-digging for this post that there is an ICAT Drive—a Google Drive folder with “manuals, how-to guides, plugins, useful code, and 3D assets.” I love this stuff. The sharing of these kinds of resources is exactly why I went on this trip...to see how we enable student and faculty uses of these kinds of facilities and how we share. I’m looking forward to exploring these public resources!

I had to put this visit together in a hurry, because I only heard about the Cube the week before I left on my trip, but I was very glad to have Virginia Tech be the last stop on my trip!

I’d like to mention that, when I visited, Virginia Tech was 9 days away from the tenth anniversary of what was at the time the deadliest single gunman shooting in the history of the US. There were signs up acknowledging the grim time marker, describing plans for programming to discuss and memorialize the tragedy. 

I remember exactly where I was, working at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill when I heard the reports unfold on NPR as I checked out A/V equipment to media production students. I remember thinking about my own students’ safety and talking to them as they came into the checkout room to get their cameras and whatnot from me, all of us shellshocked. 

In Bloomington, I had a great meeting with people from IU’s UITS Research Technologies division, including folks from the Advanced Visualization Lab and CyberDH units.

The AVL folks have been on my radar for a while, namely because of their inspiring work on trying to make video walls a more accessible technology through focusing on reproducible and open hardware designs with their IQ-Walls. They have also been doing CAVE-based virtual reality so long that they had just decommissioned a CAVE system after a decade of use.

This is one of their last remaining large-scale projection environments, with Principal Project Analyst & Team Lead Chris Eller being a virtual running bear in a student-created stereo environment:

I felt an affinity with the Indiana folks because of their focus on democratizing access to advanced visualization technologies. Increased access to technology is something that we take seriously at NC State, so it was interesting to see that ethos mirrored in a non-library University division.

In their Cyberinfrastructure Building, they manage a Science on a Sphere installation, which provides a subscription to cool geospatial datasets:

Observations:

The IQ-Wall in the Wells Library Scholars Commons is the most popular IQ-Wall on campus, and has position tracking and passive stereo.

“Content acquisition” has been a recent focus of theirs, providing access to various types of technologies that allow you to digitize real-world objects and structures (e.g., scanners)

Cost of an IQ-Wall can be $150k or less

The AVL is 20 years old!

Actively pursuing in-classroom support for VR

Learned about the Higher Education Campus Alliance for Advanced Visualization: http://www.uwyo.edu/thecaav/

Using krpano for low-cost HTML5 content production: https://krpano.com/

As I round the corner and start heading east, the Kia Rio and I have gotten to a point of grudging mutual respect. I have not once failed to find my yellow companion in all these strange parking lots and I admire the console display color, which reminds me of the Nintendo Virtual Boy’s monochrome palette, which seems appropriate for this trip.

Yesterday I went to the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and drove EIGHT HOURS to Champaign, where this morning I visited the Grainger Engineering Library IDEA Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, completing the ALL CAPS portion of the trip. 

Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry

Another thing I was looking forward to on this trip was meeting a creative technologist hero: Golan Levin, director of the STUDIO. The STUDIO is “a laboratory for atypical, anti-disciplinary, and inter-institutional research at the intersections of arts, science, technology and culture” (all caps added). One of my favorite projects of Golan’s is the Free Universal Construction Kit, a collection of .STL files that allows you to print toy block adapters that connect 10 different popular sets.

I was particularly interested in how the STUDIO provides grants and residencies for this anti-disciplinary work, and BOOM, I sure am glad I asked about it! In 2013, Golan and some others wrote this benchmarking report, a “survey of university-based artist-in-residence programs across the United States, with a particular focus on intellectual property policies and new-media arts.” Can’t wait to dive into that.

Golan also gave me a tour of the other Hunt Library’s IDeATe spaces, which, geez, I was kicking myself for not setting up a meeting with the librarians that manage that. The spaces represent an impressive investment in interdisciplinary spaces for creativity by Dean of Libraries Keith Webster, who is also the Director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives. I’ll have to follow up on the phone. Here’s a class happening in the Library’s motion capture studio.

Also, many thanks to Tom Hughes, STUDIO Associate Director, and Scott B. Weingart, ‎Digital Humanities Specialist for meeting with me. Scott is also a library hero of mine, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I never finished the data visualization MOOC he helped craft and teach, though I loved the textbook and curriculum. I was excited to hear about what he’ll be up to next...

Suspense.

Here’s a 360 photo of the STUDIO.

Grainger Engineering Library IDEA Lab

I am SO EXCITED to finally be able to say that on July 5, Shelby Hallman from UIUC will be joining us at NC State to work on our Visualizing Digital Scholarship grant and strategic initiative. I met Shelby, Acting Dean of Libraries and University Librarian Bill Mischo, Media Commons Coordinator Eric Kurt, and Library Operations Associate and Association of Research Libraries Diversity Scholar Alex Cabada at the IDEA Lab this morning. Here’s Bill demonstrating their visualization wall with the VMD application. Someone at NC State EMAILED ME ABOUT VMD AT ALMOST THE EXACT SAME TIME THIS WAS HAPPENING:

A handful of points from our meetings, with regards to a stronger community of practice around visualization spaces:

We could use some better operating system support for large-scale multitouch (Windows 10 tablet mode doesn’t cut it! Linux??).

Portability of applications and content for these spaces is important and could use some work.

Visualization spaces support collaborative goals in UIUC’s larger design learning goals.

HTML5 is good

Costs for installing a visualization wall can approach $100k or lower.

It’s hard enough to know what’s happening on your campus, much less on other campuses.

VMD looks awesome in large-scale high resolution.

Song of the Day

This song snapped me out of a sleepy spell on the road between Champaign and Bloomington. I never knew what he was saying in that awesome part where he does the thing with his voice until today when I Googled it.

I planned to go to New York last Friday and Saturday, but only managed to go Saturday (as explained in my previous post). I did the "hyper-reality” Ghostbuster's Experience at Madame Tussaud's, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design, and Times Square on 7th Avenue. I'm writing from Pittsburgh, where I visited the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh this afternoon.

Madame Tussaud's

What good was Madame Tussaud's before cell phone cameras? That appeared to be the main purpose of the place: taking pictures of yourself and your companions with lifeless wax likenesses of celebrities. I was pretty uninterested in that, the new 15' animatronic King Kong head, and I declined to stick my hand into a vat of ice to be waxinated. Gross.

Meaning that I paid $59 for a "4D" animated Marvel superhero short and a virtual reality "experience" about busting ghosts. I don't need to be squirted with water in any other 4D theater experiences for a while (maybe until squirting technology improves?), but paying the big bucks to fry the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was worth every penny...of my generous sponsors' money. Expensive, but worth it to know what "state of the art" virtual reality "rides" are like these days (no climbing, jumping, or running).

Mom above: Mark, look at me. Look at me. This is VIRTUAL REALITY. You’re going to feel like you’re in a crazy place. But just remember: You’re just in a room. You can take your headset off. You’re not going to fall off a building or anything.

More on the Ghostbusters Experience: I suited up with a family of 3. you wear your computer on your back (your “proton pack”) and your gun only has one functional trigger. You wear a helmet and all you see is computer graphics generated inside your visor. Audio is piped into headphones. I could only barely understand the expository voiceover and the 10 year-old's voices in my ear. He was maybe supposed to be the team leader and was barking orders I didn't catch. You move through rooms as you bust (or don't) ghosts, and the walls and doors in your display are IRL physical things that you can reach out and touch. Once when shooting ghosts out of the side of a building, a reached out to the fire escape rail in front of me and, sure enough, there was a cold, old piece of steel tubing there for me to grab onto.

Super fun. Someone on staff reached out and grabbed my plastic gun and shook it and scared the hell out of me, playing on the tension of not being able to see what's actually in the room with you. Once when I was in the wrong place, another person grabbed my backpack and pulled me backwards away from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, whom we were defeating, although apparently it is possible to fail at that task, at which point he would have just walked away after having ripped the roof off our building and taking a couple swipes at us. The mom in the group said she smelled marshmallow, though I did not.

Sometimes the guns floated around in space in ways they weren't supposed to, but in general, the graphics seemed snappy and I was immersed enough to be laughing and shouting (with strangers) the whole time. Delight factor = high.

There were also a couple holographic Slimers, one done with mirrors and one using mist as a projection medium:

Thoughts on Marvel Super Heroes 4D:

This was a passive 3D animation where the seats move and stuff, like the Newseum movie. Lots of water in your face, e.g., when frost giant spit splatters over your face after Hulk smashes him. Something poked me in the back when an energy beam captured me. Things tickled my legs at a few points, which was impressive and weird because my bag was underneath my seat. Animation textures were good but the movements were stiff. Not much Z axis interaction.

Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design

Cooper Hewitt was down to just two floors, as the 3rd was closed for exhibit installation, but I only had to pay $5. It was small, but had what has been one of my favorite tricks so far. This, "the pen."

It does two things: It allows you to interact with any of the handful of touch surfaces throughout the museum and it allows you to "save" designs to an online location you (and others, you included!) can access later. It is a magic wand of the most magic variety, and I want them for our library.

In this video, I fumble around with the saving gesture (pressing the pen's back end against the crosses printed on exhibit descriptions), but only because I was trying to record myself doing it. It was easy and fun, and lights and a small vibration give you positive feedback it is working. I found this feature especially useful because I was running around the City like a madman and didn't have much time. I could focus on the aesthetic experience of the designs and save the metadata to read later. Huge. Every museum needs this. Every library needs this. And so so so much better than QR codes.

The pen also worked as a stylus for touch tables that allowed you to do things like make your own designs and learn more about the museums' collections. The reason I sought out Cooper Hewitt was because of this Immersion Room exhibit, which allows you to use the pen to design your own wallpapers or browse the museum's wallpaper collection and project it into the space. It was a good lesson about the role and power of repetition in design. Also high on the delight scale. Most people seemed more interested in designing their own wallpapers than in seeing pieces from the collections.

Times Square

Outside visualization spaces are different than inside visualization spaces, but Times Square was one of the first places in the world to have large-scale dynamic signage in a public space. I visited out of obligation and a certain amount of reverence. In this vibrating vision-scape of light, I saw almost nothing. My banner-ad blindness kicked in hard here, and I wanted to avert my eyes from the ads. Despite Snøhetta's best efforts, I only stopped long enough to take a panorama, and ran to catch my train.

The most effective thing was this wrap-around block corner ad from Snapchat. The non-digital, not moving, blank fields of color were a bold departure from the surrounding environs and made it the only thing I could bear to look at.

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

This morning I left my mother-in-law's house in Flanders, NJ and drove to Pittsburgh, where I made it in time to spend an hour at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. By that time, it was mercifully empty of kids, so I didn't feel like too much of a weirdo taking pictures of children playing on the exhibits. Fun stuff, but I wanted my kiddo there.

You can't go wrong abstracting your body into different things:

But my favorite thing was this aural experience and physical activity incentivizer:

Since my last update, I've been to Baltimore and Philadelphia and aborted a plan to go to New York City Friday because of nonstop brutal rain and underestimating the reality of getting in and out of the City in a car (though I type this from 7th Ave). In Baltimore, I went to Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the American Visionary Art Museum. In Philly, I saw the Comcast Experience in the Comcast Center.

Random thoughts:

Brody Learning Commons and Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University

I went to the Johns Hopkins Brody Learning Commons attached to the Eisenhower Library.

Not long after I started working at NCSU Libraries, when I was neck-deep in trying to help figure out the content plan for the video walls being built in the Hunt Library, this article came out about a video wall in Hopkins' Brody Learning Commons. I have to admit that the competitor in me was sad that Hopkins got a Chronicle article about video walls in libraries, because it meant that we probably wouldn't get one about our walls at Hunt. And we didn't. But ever since then, I've wanted to meet Sayeed Choudhury and see the video wall, and today I did. Kind of. The tiled display discussed in the Chronicle article has now been replaced with a single large screen that is driven by a smaller, touch-enabled screen where the content is mirrored for interaction. Shown here with Sayeed (left) and Senior Software Engineer Mark Patton:

This big screen, like the wall before it, involves partnership with a researcher. This time with a neuroscience professor who has expertise in cognitive factors in user interaction. Faculty collaboration on viz spaces = necessary.

The Digital Library Federation was mentioned for a second time as a possible place to strengthen a community of practice around video walls. Promising.

Sayeed was a very gracious host. He arranged for a whole room full of library staff to have an interactive discussion with me about our work at Hunt and then he and Mark demonstrated their screen for me. Then we had a nice lunch with data and geospatial services librarians.

Career lowlight: showing up 25 minutes late for my presentation because of some bad mussels in DC. That's what I get for going to the place that has the "widest selection of beers in DC." Everyone was still really nice to me.

Data rescue is a thing Sayeed is into right now. He knew of confirmed cases of climate data that has recently become inaccessible. They don't know if it's still there or not.

Baltimore Museum of Art

We had lunch at the restaurant in the Baltimore Museum of Art (sparse salad for me, thanks). I only had half an hour to breeze through this gem, which I didn't know anything about before visiting. Fantastic collection of modern and contemporary art, including lots of pieces you'd recognize from art anthologies from Miró, Magritte, Warhol, Albers, etc.

Cool thing: this interactive space that invites you to complete the sentence "Home is ______" by typing into a tablet. Your answer along with others is projected on the floor. I like the seating nook.

American Visionary Art Museum

I just cannot stop thinking about this place. When I told my wife that it was my favorite museum of all time, she said, "You said that about the last museum you went to." I'm on a roll! But no, really, the AVAM may well be my favorite place on this planet.

They collect the most wonderful and joyous, existential and otherworldly, mysterious and meticulous, endearing and hilarious creations available in this country. I offer to take any of you out to lunch if you'll let me tell you about everything I saw there.

In the meantime, I'll just mention this. Here's a 360 photo (use a Cardboard, if you have one) of one of the spaces in the YUMMM! exhibit. It's a community art project where participants used bread and burninating to make art. Also visible is a life-size gummy of Flaming Lips guy Wayne Coyne, made in collaboration with North Carolina company that makes the WORLD’S LARGEST GUMMY BEARS!™

AVAM is an educational museum and their principles and community engagement activities are top shelf. Any educator interested in creativity or diversity will find their seven education goals well worth your time, as they provide a framework for thinking about both. "Expand the definition of a worthwhile human life." Oof. That gets me right here, it really does.

I just can't say enough superlative things about this flat out delightful place. If you're considering a move to Baltimore, I highly encourage it.

Comcast Experience

Friday, I only managed to visit the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, home of the Comcast Experience, an 83.3´ wide by 25.4´ high video wall, which is at least 9 years old, making it one of the older largest indoor video walls that I know of. It’s a nice example of what you can do with a whole production team dedicated to producing content for your space. Good for a corporate effort but less delightful than the AVAM is in its little finger. And yeah, a fancy video wall doesn’t mean that Comcast doesn’t suck.

Song of the day: Sonny & The Sunsets “Green Blood”

Today I visited the University of Mary Washington Simpson Library and Hurley Convergence Center in Fredericksburg, Virginia and then drove to DC and went to the Newseum. I only just refilled the Rio, which is its one redeeming quality, averaging 40ish MPG on the highway.

I originally thought I'd only visit libraries on this trip, but when I sat down to map out my options, I found that I wanted to see other kinds of visualization spaces, too. The Convergence Center is a good example of how some universities are bringing together a wide array of technology-enabled student services into non-library, non-departmental, non-student union buildings. Like retro video game spaces.

I particularly liked the synergy between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (where faculty get help building tech-based assignments) and the Digital Knowledge Center (where students get tutoring doing those assignments). They were right next door to each other, and the DTLT folks had super-hip things like wiggle boards [sic] and a pair of Snapchat glasses. When standing desks are just not enough for Instructional Technology Specialist Lee Skallerup Bessette:

I was also really impressed with how well the Convergence Center and the Libraries work together. They seemed to appreciate each others' strengths and work collaboratively to figure out how to best serve UMW students and faculty.

The reason I sought out Mary Wash (I think someone said that?), was their Media Wall. I found a kindred spirit in Assistant Professor of Digital and Kinetic Imaging Jason Robinson, who curates an art program for the Media Wall. Everyone who has public visualization spaces (i.e., video walls) which need curated content handle it differently. In a very brief time, I got a lot of ideas from Jason about ways we could expand our Code+Art program. I was very encouraged by the success he has had reaching out to the global video artist community to exhibit work at Hurley.

My hosts were University Librarian Rosemary Arneson, Building Manager Cartland Berge, and Digital Resources Librarian Angie White. Thank you!

Talking with them and Head of Special Collections/Archives Carolyn Parsons, three opportunity areas came up that were mutually interesting:

Capturing complex multimodal works in institutional repositories

Providing accessibility in high-tech spaces

Strengthening a community of practice around visualization spaces

The Newseum is sadly/strangely the only place in DC that I'll visit, an artifact of the extreme traveling to which I'm subjecting the Rio. Also, why do these museums all close at 5?

It's six floors of pretty intense and awesome storytelling about journalism and history as told by journalists. Some relevant exhibits include:

A VR Lab with Samsung Gear VRs. Every month, they curate excerpts from ten recent 360 video projects (not computer graphics "VR"). Interesting because of the volume of people that they service. Good chairs for spinning, basic instructions playing on a video loop (take the thing off if you feel dizzy), no headphones (just everyone's audio blaring, surprisingly not that distracting), and timed/ticketed entry.

A 100-foot wide theater playing a custom-produced video about the role of benefit rock concerts like Live Aid on society. Geez, I thought I had aspect ratio problems. I teared up at the part where Freddie Mercury was singing "Radio Ga Ga," but apparently the donations really rolled in during The Car's "Drive."

A "4D" movie about groundbreaking journalists where your seat moves and little bursts of air make it feel like the wind is blowing. I couldn't figure out where the air was coming from. Very small amounts of movement are surprisingly effective in augmenting a 3D experience. The wind was just a little weird. Great to learn about about the first investigative/undercover journalist Nellie Bly, who helped expose abusive "insane asylum" practices by getting herself committed.

When you try to selfie in VR:

Just one personal thing. I grew up in Mississippi and in my state history class, we learned about almost none of the civil rights history that was depicted on the 4th floor. Are you kidding me? I hate it when that happens, and it happens too much.

Tomorrow: Johns Hopkins and the American Visionary Art Museum!

Daily Index 11: number of Mary Washington people I met 78.5: number of miles traveled today (seemed much longer) 1: number of wrong turns in DC 240: minimum number of minutes it takes to upload 63 photos and videos from my phone to this photo album on Red Roof wifi Radio Ga Ga: song of the Day

I managed to rent a car with no cruise control. So I'll be driving about 2000 miles where once a minute or so, I think to myself, Damn it, I wish I had cruise control. That's if I allow myself 250 miles of urban driving where I'm instead worrying about getting lost. I suppose it's bourgeois to assume that all rental cars should come with cruise control.

I'm driving all over the eastern United States to visit interactive visualization spaces! I'll be going to museums, libraries, academic technology centers, and Madame Tussauds to see what others are doing and to discuss how we, in this community of practice, could work together better. I'll be driving around for 11 days and visiting 14 different places and I'm so stoked for this!

Hertz guy: You’ve got a keeahreeah.

Me: A what?

Hertz guy: A Kia Rio.

Me: Oh.

Me: [silence]

I'll post daily reflections to my Tumblr here, other things on Twitter, and will be updating this Google Photos album. If we photo together, please add yours to the social ether! The hashtag #VizSpaces is wide open, so I'm planting the flag, starting now.  Here's a map of the places I'm visiting.

Tomorrow I have my first meeting with folks at The University of Mary Washington. I'm excited to talk about their Media Wall. I need to go think of more questions to ask them. More about the purpose of this trip tomorrow.

Daily Index 208.7: miles travelled today Weird Diseases by The Magnetic Fields: song of the day Richmond, VA: most experimental highway design I’ve seen

“Human beings try to find patterns to explain the reason behind almost every phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that there is a pattern to rely on.”

The Surprising History of the Infographic

“This website aims to explore the myths surrounding dataviz and look for the truth behind them. To show what the rule actually means, when to apply it and when to disregard it.”

It’s all about the language support.

“You may think that the debate over pie charts was a new one, but it has raged on for at least 100 years. Brinton started it in 1914, and great drama unfolded in the pages of the Journal of the American Statistical Association in the 1920s.”

“Over a century ago, the ability to draw was a necessity. No cameras, printers, copiers, or online images – if you wanted to convey information visually, you had to do it yourself.” -  Jennifer Landin