viz.

Image Credit: TACC H / T to Scott Nelson

In my very first post for viz., I marveled at Ben Fry’s visualization tool The Preservation of Favoured Traces, which helps us to visualize Darwin’s revision of Origin of Species over six editions. With a background in computer science, statistics, and graphic design, Fry had managed to approach the problem of visualizing textual history with striking economy and elegance. In my post, I wondered about the unorthodox solutions (and research questions) we might discover if we engaged in digital collaborations with designers and engineers. This question resurfaced yesterday as I toured the visualization lab at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

The centerpiece of TACC’s visualization lab is the world’s highest resolution tiled-display (at 307 megapixels), a 15 screen x 5 screen array of 75 30-inch flat panel monitors named Stallion. (All of the equipment has a Texas-kitsch moniker: e.g., Rattlesnake, Mustang, Horseshoe.) Other areas of the lab included a 20 x 11-foot flat screen mini-theater and an 82-inch 3D back-projection display. A partitioned collaboration room allows small groups to develop visualizations.

On our tour, we viewed samples of both art projects and scientific simulations that reinforced how (to quote the TACC web site) “visualizations generated by supercomputers can immerse you in data, visually.” Upon entering the darkened space, we were confronted with photographer Ricardo Meleschi’s one giga-pixel panoramic image of downtown Austin; a controller allows visitors to zoom in on a street sign or the inside of an apartment with remarkable (and rather invasive) clarity. The lab has also hosted two digital art exhibitions. Of the art pieces we viewed on Stallion, my favorite was one by Bill Haddad that riffed on the security-camera set-up of the monitors, offering faux surveillance footage of campus buildings and outdoor spaces manipulated to look like it was being taken in real-time. Clearly, though, collaborations with scientific researchers have been the lab’s focus: for example, we saw simulations that predicted, respectively, the path of Hurricane Ike and the patterned spread of the H1N1 virus in the U.S.

Image Credit: TACC H / T to Scott Nelson

As an instructor, I can be admittedly dinosaur-like, feeling that we should be clear on our pedagogical goals first before considering the technologies that enable us to achieve them. But as I stared at a sophisticated molecular model out of a pair of fancy 3D glasses embedded with a microchip, my techno-skepticism vanished, and I wondered why the chemists should have all the fun. When I asked Visualization Lab Manager Brandt Westing if the lab had worked with researchers in the liberal arts, he responded that this was a population the lab would love to collaborate with but that it was difficult to get the word out. All UT faculty, staff, and students have access to the visualization lab, which includes extensive training and support from TACC staff. Maybe we should just start dreaming up projects, albeit necessarily clunky and unsophisticated ones at first, and use the technology to see new questions and patterns?

Ultimately, though, my visit to TACC’s visualization lab raises larger questions than whether or not one absolutely needs to use supercomputers to do research in rhetoric, writing, and literature (the answer, alas, is probably “no”). More broadly, the lab is a high-tech space that invites us to think about the role that visualization (even if unabashedly low-tech) might have not only in presenting our research but also generating and investigating our research questions.