Places & Spaces

Katy Börner <katy@indiana.edu> is the Victor H. Yngve Associate Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Informatics, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Biocomplexity Institute, Fellow of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. </>Her research focuses on the development of visualization methodologies (knowledge domains, users of 3D virtual worlds, interfaces to digital libraries), networks and diffusion of knowledge, and the development of infrastructures for large scale scientific collaboration and computation. She and her colleagues at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center serve the Scholarly Database of 18 million scholarly records, Information Visualization Cyberinfrastructure, and the Network Workbench Tool and Community Wiki.

Elisha Hardy <efhardy@gmail.com> is the Graphic Designer and co-curator of the Places & Spaces exhibit. She recently graduated from Indiana University with a Batchelors in Fine Arts with a focus on Graphic Design. She has been with the project since June 2005. She has been involved in the design of many of the maps from each iteration as well as posters, handouts, postcards and other designs for the exhibit. She has plans to continue in the Graphic Design field and dreams of living in New York City.

Deborah MacPherson <debmacp@gmail.com>is projects director for the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization Accuracy & Aesthetics based in Vienna VA. She has over 15 years experience designing exhibitions to tell stories about history, science, and society <www.deborahmacpherson.com>. Accuracy & Aesthetics was established in 2004 with the mission of making sense of the digital age for purposes of international research and teaching <www.accuracyandaesthetics.com>. Deborah is an advocate for the creation of simple overviews for the general public and experts venturing outside their discipline. She is interested in looking at and discussing a wide variety of approaches for fitting together humanity's collective knowledge and expertise in logical and beautiful maps. Places & Spaces is particularly interesting because it is an interdisciplinary scientific effort with the aim of making science more understandable and intriguing to the masses. Her hope is that some time in the future, techniques for networking and mapping science may also be used to connect arts, music, and humanities databases in a similarly rigorous and appealing manner.

Kevin Boyack <kboyack@sandia.gov> is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff in the Computation, Computers, and Mathematics Center at Sandia National Laboratories. His main responsibility is analysis using Sandia's VxInsight® knowledge visualization tool with various types of data (literature, patent, genome, etc.). He has produced and analyzed science maps or domain visualizations from literature and patent sources on many topics of interest to Sandia for competitive intelligence purposes. He is also interested in semantics, augmented cognition, and the application of mathematical tools to information spaces.

Sara Irina Fabrikant <sara@geo.uzh.ch> a Swiss mapematician, is currently an Associate Professor of Geography and head of the Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA) group at the GIScience Center <http://www.geo.uzh.ch/gia /aboutus/> at the Geography Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research and teaching interests lie in geographic information visualization (geovis), GIScience and cognition, graphical user interface design and dynamic cartography.  She received an M.S. in geography from the University of Zurich and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was awarded a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship to study Geographic Information Science for one academic year at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1993. She publishes in a variety of GIScience/geovis related journals and is currently a member of the Editorial Boards of Cartographic Perspectives, Cartographica, Revue Internationale de Géomatique, and Transactions in GIS, in addition to her Program Committee memberships for various GIScience/geovis related conferences ( e.g., GIScience, COSIT, InfoVis (UK), Diagrams, etc.). She has made various presentations (in English and in German) at national and international professional meetings, including invited keynotes and other lectures at universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. Other service include an elected post on the council of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe, and memberships of the Association of American Geographers, the International Cartographic Association's Commission on Visualization and Virtual Environments, the North American Cartographic Information Society, and the Swiss Society of Cartography.

Peter A. Hook <pahook@indiana.edu> is currently a doctoral student at Indiana University--Bloomington where he is a member of Dr. Katy Börner's Information Visualization Laboratory. He has a J.D. from the University of Kansas (1997) and a M.S.L.I.S. from The University of Illinois (2000). Prior to doctoral study, he was a law librarian for four years. His primary research focus is information visualization. Particular interests include the visualization of knowledge organization systems, concept mapping, and the spatial navigation of bibliographic data in which the underlying structural organization of the domain is conveyed to the user. Additional interests include social network theory, knowledge organization systems, and legal bibliometrics and informatics.

Andre Skupin <skupin@mail.sdsu.edu> is an assistant professor of Geography at San Diego State University. Prior to this he held an associate professor position at the University of New Orleans. He received a Master's degree in Cartography at the Technical University Dresden, Germany, and a doctoral degree in Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo. During his graduate studies he performed research at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). He has worked in the geographic information systems (GIS) industry in Germany, the United States, and South Africa. Dr. Skupin's core research area is the application of geographic metaphors, cartographic principles, and computational methods in the visualization of non-geographic information. His research is strongly interdisciplinary, aimed especially at increased cross-fertilization between geography, information science, and computer science. For example, he has developed new approaches to create map-like knowledge domain visualizations on the basis of high-dimensional vector space models and artificial neural networks. Recent work includes novel methods for visualizing individual human movement and demographic change as trajectories in n-dimensional attribute space.

Bonnie DeVarco <devarco@cruzio.com> regularly writes and lectures on emerging technologies in education, virtual worlds, collaborative visualization, next generation geographic information systems, information visualization and the culture of cyberspace. Since 1999, she has developed and co-directed LinkWorld, a 3D multi-user world for high school students, through the BorderLink Project, a federally funded Technology Innovation Challenge Grant. DeVarco served as an education technology consultant to non-profit, corporate and educational organizations for the past 16 years (this list includes PBS, Stanford University, the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies and James Burke's Knowledge Web, UC Santa Cruz, UCOP, Smithsonian Institute, DigitalSpace and others). She has helped develop multi-institutional programs for distance and media enhanced learning for the University of California Office of the President as a research and development consultant for the UC College Prep Initiative (UCCP) from 1998 to 2003. DeVarco currently serves as Senior Researcher for the NSF funded Interactive Earth 2 Project, a next generation interactive for Earth Systems Science led by WorldLink Media, TERC, NASA Goddard and the World Resources Institute (WRI). She is founder of VLearn3D, an international networking hub for educators using multi-user worlds in education. DeVarco has regularly produced educational events in cyberspace and in distributed physical locations and leads efforts to research, explore and develop new opportunities for telecollaboration, visualization, education and environmental action using advanced satellite and network technologies, visualization and open source tools.

Chaomei Chen <chaomei.chen@cis.drexel.edu> is Associate Professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University and Visiting Professor in th School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics at Brunel University. His research includes information visualization, detecting and visualizing evolving scientific paradigms and knowledge diffusion, visual navigation in hypertext and digital libraries, and human-computer interaction. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Information Visualization, published quarterly by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the author of Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon (Springer, 2004) and Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization (Springer, 2003).

Dawn  Wright <dawn@dusk.geo.orst.edu> is professor of  Geography and Oceanography at Oregon State University. Her research  interests include geographic information science, marine geography, tectonics of mid-ocean ridges, and the processing and  interpretation of high-resolution bathymetric, video, and underwater  photographic images. As director of the Davey Jones Locker Seafloor  Mapping/Marine GIS Laboratory (dusk.geo.orst.edu/djl/samoa) at OSU, she and her  students develop 3-D visualizations of the seafloor, GIS tools for  benthic terrain characterization, and most recently, ontologies and  semantics distributed oceanographic databases. Dawn serves on the  editorial boards of the International Journal of Geographical  Information Science, Transactions in GIS, and Geospatial  Solutions, as well as on the National Academy of Sciences' National  Needs for Coastal Mapping and Charting Committee. Her most recent books  include Undersea with GIS (ESRI Press, 2002), Marine and  Coastal Geographical Information Systems (with D. Bartlett, Taylor  & Francis, 2000), and Place Matters: Geospatial Tools for Marine  Science, Conservation, and Management in the Pacific Northwest  (with A. Scholz, Oregon State University Press, 2005).

Former Curators

Julie Smith <jsmarie@gmail.com> was the co-curator of the Places & Spaces exhibit from August 2006 - August 2007. She recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and Anthropology from Indiana University where her undergraduate thesis work focused on developing better interpretation of remote sensing data in Archaeological fieldwork. She has a strong interest in seeing the knowledge we ‘discover’ in research institutions and universities made better available to the general public in more universally comprehensible forms. She has explored this interest in the past while working with local museums creating presentations of history and archaeological research, and is excited about working with the Places and Spaces exhibit because of the broad potential it offers to introduce the public to science research.

For further information please contact Katy Börner and Elisha Hardy, Indiana University.