The fourth Science Online conference just wrapped up, and it was as lively as ever. Unfortunately, my attendance was limited since I was coming down with a cold. I attended only a couple of sessions and tried to keep interactions to a minimum, which was hard to do at such an interactive conference with many friendly and familiar faces from previous years. Good thing I’ve been practicing most of my life at keeping to myself.
It was nice to see JMP 8, the product I help develop, on the desktop of one of the presentation machines, though I didn’t find out whose machine it was.
I did make it to Tara Richerson‘s session on Scientific Visualization, even though it was in a small conference room at about 3x capacity. (The facilities at Sigma Xi RTP were otherwise excellent.) She did a good job leading the discussion, especially considering the broadness of the topic and of the diversity of the audience. Given the amount of interest, visualization could be a separate track onto itself in the future. Tara posited that a good (online) visualization has: Story + Interactivity + Glanceability.