Much to my absolute shock and surprise, I received an email just over two weeks ago that the project I led as the final stage of my thesis work, Skeleton, won best paper at IEEE VIS. This is, of course, one of my greatest achievements and easily the greatest professional recognition I’ve received so far in my life.

First off: Skeleton gets a win during spooky season? My favorite time of year? Incredible personal victory.

(Before I blog any further, you’re welcome to learn more about our project Skeleton over on the other post I blogged once we learned it was accepted at VIS a little while back. This blog post is not an introduction to the project, so consider yourself warned that adequate context about the paper will not be provided here, heh.)

I love the visualization community, both academic and not. And I started out in a small slice of the academic world of things back in 2015, doing a visualization REU at Clemson University (which was also my introduction to Digital Humanities as a field of work). Books by Munzner, Cairo, and Drucker filled me with inspiration. A satisfying and rewarding little industry career kicked off after that before I started my PhD in 2021 to focus on visualization and accessibility. I connected with both academics and industry folks all over the world thanks to Twitter in the late 2010s (RIP), many of whom are now good friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators.

To say that a best paper award at VIS is an honor really is an understatement. A while ago, I wrote down several bucket list items like finishing my tabletop rpg, writing a few books, paying off my student debt, and quite specifically, getting a best paper award at IEEE VIS. I figured each of these would take a decade or two (or more) to pull off. I’m frankly shocked that I’ve at least got one of these checked off so early in life.

But I’d like to take a moment to explain a few things now to folks who might not be savvy on what VIS is. VIS, short for visualization, is our premier academic conference. And to some academics, a conference isn’t really a big deal. But in the computer sciences, and visualization being included among them, we do our main peer review and publication work through our conferences. A full paper accepted at VIS is a feat on its own (generally >25% acceptance rate). This is where we send our best.

I had struggled with impostor syndrome for years. I didn’t feel welcome or remotely like I belonged in academic spaces. And to some degree, I really am a terrible academic. Or, at least I am a really atypical one. Skeleton is a testament to this, actually. It’s not a standard research paper. It’s a long-running quest to build first, research later. That is far too risky for a standard academic path. On the one hand, we really knew what we wanted to build before we did any industry work. We knew we wanted some kind of visual interface for crafting non-visual experiences. But the texture of what this kind of interface looks like, how it operates, what questions it asks of us, and (more importantly), the empirical evidence that justifies it, was all missing. I wasn’t a good academic, chasing building and making before really having a plan put together. It was a mess. Dominik and Patrick put up with my nonsense for years. I pretty much did whatever I wanted, a terrible PhD student and employee, really.

I certainly wouldn’t expect a PhD student to have done what I did. I wouldn’t want replication of our work. Far too risky, expensive, slow-moving, and so on. Perhaps, to some degree, this is why it won “best paper” (I’ll unpack this a little more later).

Yet at the same time, while a best paper award is a massive honor and I truly don’t feel like I deserve this kind of recognition (nor does my already-massive ego need any additional ammunition like this), the “best” in a best paper award never sat well with me. In general, I find recognitions like these to be strange and alien to comprehend (at least in principle). But a few years back, Zong, Lee, and Lundgard won an honorable mention for Rich Screen Reader Experiences (truly a masterpiece paper that I could talk about for hours). And to me, yes, this was the best paper at EuroVis. In some ways, I wish it won “best” and not just “honorable mention,” but it occurred to me that I should stop thinking about some atomic moment where papers are measured based on merits and instead think about the social role that papers play.

And when I think about a council of wizards, folks who know and care about a field of work and have dedicated decades of their life to it. When this council points at a paper and says, “this one is the best,” they are saying far more than simply “the merits of this piece are better than others.” What they want to do is call attention to excellence. In particular, they want their field to pay attention to not only an exemplary piece, but one that they believe will push the boundaries of the shared space they inhabit with their peers. Derya’s utterly fantastic paper on operationalizing feminist theory in visualization is perhaps my favorite example of this. The judges knew what they were doing when they gave it a best paper award. Our field needs to pay attention to it. It is paradigm-shifting in many ways.

A good council of wizards understands that “best” isn’t useful on its own. But by recognizing the work of others and elevating specific papers and projects, we might inspire new directions. The award then doesn’t serve as a backward look at something that has completed and is over, but is using completed work as a hopeful look forward, towards what could be. A “best paper” isn’t just a signal of faith in a single artifact, but a signal that the stewards of our community have faith we will figure out what to do next.

And this is why I am honored to receive a best paper award. Not because I even remotely care about being the “best” but because winning this award is a deeply hopeful recognition in the value this piece might have to offer our field. I’m humbled that my peers would think this. And in some ways, baffled. I really don’t know if I’d encourage someone else to repeat what I’ve done. But I do hope that more work directly with practitioners happens (which is also why I’m happy to be chairing Cluster a one-day practitioner’s summit at VIS this year). I also, of course, hope that visualization offers itself up to serve the problems of accessibility more than it does. I opened the paper with this “provocation” and I certainly still mean it.

During my PhD, visualization was so concerned with solving accessibility and borrowing from the practices and problems of accessibility, that I feel like it forgot itself for a moment. Visualization has plenty to offer back. I love the richness of our projects on interactivity and tool-making in particular. And I also even hope that the shared work of grammars, infrastructures, performance, and many other little things we seem to care about in visualization can trickle over into accessibility’s domain as well.

But my final note is this: I left industry to explore how the heck we can motivate people to actually do accessibility work. Chartability was step one. That’s checklist-style accessibility; imperatives, guidelines, and heuristics. But that only gets you so far. Real “designerly” thinking, where you wrestle with highly complex problems (some of which may be impossible to solve in a single interface, as we argue in Softerware, which will also be presented at VIS this year), feels impossible to motivate in people. I really did leave industry because of this. It seemed like HCI was the path I needed to investigate. I had to know more about why people make the decisions they do and how we might be able to introduce technologies that can shift their behaviors.

And as I argue at the end of my thesis, I really think that tools and technologies only take us so far. Checklists get us some of the way. Tools, a little further. But we can’t tool our way out of broken priorities, lack of funding, unenforced policies, or dysfunctional federal support. Even so, it gave me just a touch of hope to see that visualization did seem, to some degree, to give practitioners a material to respond to. Did they design good designs? Likely not. We didn’t evaluate that. But did they demonstrate the signature behaviors of design? Iteration? Reflection? Deconstruction? Yes. I’d love to see more work like this down the road.

To write a paper where we argue that people who are sighted might be the ones who face sensory barriers to access felt nearly absurd. But when you work enough with visual people, you realize that they think visually, write visually, and speak visually. Their tools and languages are visual. Their materials are visual. Is it an equity and justice issue that we are (yet again) recentering visuals in design? Yes. But I don’t know if we can expect someone to communicate, design, and think in modalities that they haven’t spent years in already.

The next steps beyond this work will be interesting to see. Do we use visual language to help sighted practitioners first translate and then begin to think in ways that center non-visuals? Do we lean further into visual authoring? Do we explore how quality shifts and changes? Do we look at false assumptions, mistakes, and problems that arise when non-visuals are translated into visuals for design work? Probably yes to all of these. I’d love for my peers to tackle these questions (and more).

In any case, thanks to my community for putting up with my nonsense for years. I appreciate that my paper has been held up as a piece for others to look at, inspect, critique, and build off of.

I look forward to seeing many of you at VIS. I hope you can make it out for my talk, and perhaps chat with me after.