Finding the Best of VIS 2020 (WIP)

When writing short summaries of my first data visualization conference failed, I turned to data to make sense of VIS 2020 sessions.

Back in October of 2020, I had the chance to attend VIS 2020. Attend (defined in 2020)= tuning into a YouTube live stream and interacting with other participants over chat and a Discord server.

VIS 2020 was the largest data visualization conference hosted under IEEE, since it combined three areas- VAST, INFOVIS and SCIVIS.

Here’s a quick peek at the top paper sessions, workshops and panels, charted against the excitement of the keynotes.

Over 6 days, VIS hosted:
9 workshops
6 tutorials and panels
24 full paper sessions
5 short paper sessions
and about 16 other events…

That adds up to 127 hours of content on schedule!

How does a newbie find the most interesting sessions to attend from the comfort of their bedroom?

VIS 2020 attracted 5,775 attendees- all watching sessions on YouTube and interacting over the live chat and rooms on Discord. The chat section of the first fully online VIS conference became a treasure trove of reactions, questions and conversation about data visualization.

The quickest way to start would be to find sessions that generated the most chat activity.

I pulled a python scraper off Github and with some help from a friend, set it to work on the list of urls extracted from the conference calendar .ics file.

Disclaimer: This only got me 60% of those 127 hours.

Ranking sessions simply by message counts

Diving deeper, we could check what these messages contained (Hint: Lots and lots of emoji 😅).

Wading through the text, there are still some easy highlights. Participants helpfully dropped links all across the sessions- referencing papers, blog posts and a host of good resources! Here’s a look at the top sessions with texts containing “http”

Links shared across sessions coloured by participant

Of course, the links included a whole bunch of GIFs.

Sessions ranked by how many GIFs were shared

Guess where VIS is heading next year!

The plan ahead is to put together a series of data stories focussing on different aspects of the dataset.

Counting Conference Chats: An overview of VIS 2020 told through message counts

Finding the Best of Viz 2020: Charting sessions by the number of appreciations shared or the depth of discussion.

Who’s Who of VIS 2020: A story featuring attendees who actively interacted online, giving feedback, appreciation and critique. Might just figure out that Best GIF Award!

and maybe some more…Do keep an eye out here for updates!