Show It or Tell It? Text, Visualization, and Their Combination

Abstract: In this talk I will share observations about the role of language in visualization and in other modes of visual expression. I will pose questions such as: how do we decide what to express via language vs via visuals? How do we choose what kind of text to use when creating visualizations, and does that choice matter? Does anyone prefer text over visuals, under what circumstances, and why? Why is visualization ineffective for expressing text content? And what are the ramifications for this combination given the success of Generative AI at creating and analyzing multimodal data?

Bio: Dr. Marti Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information and the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley. Her research encompasses user interfaces with a focus on search, information visualization with a focus on text, computational linguistics, and educational technology. She is the author of Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on that topic. She is a former President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a member of the CHI Academy and the SIGIR Academy, an ACM Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and has received four Excellence in Teaching Awards from the students of UC Berkeley. She received her PhD, MS, and BA degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC.