User Requirements for Visualization in e-Social Science

Organisers

Wes Sharrock & Joanna Leng, University of Manchester, UK

Colin C. Venters & Tobias M. Schiebeck, National Centre for e-Social Science, UK

Organiser Biographies

Wes Sharrock is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where he has been on the staff since 1967. Areas of interest philosophy of social science, sociological theory, studies of work. Authored and co-authored a large number of books, papers in journals, and chapters in books - recent publications include Perspectives in Sociology , fifth edition, (written with E. Cuff and D. Francis), a Korean translation of Kuhn; Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (written with R. Read) and an Italian translation of the third edition of Philosophy of Social Research (with J. Hughes), and papers in Theory and Psychology, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Information Systems. Current research includes a study of mathematics as a social practice and a critique of contemporary philosophy of mind.

Joanna Leng is a senior visualization engineer at the University of Manchester. She completed a MSc in Computer Science in 1996 and since then she has worked at Manchester on several projects focused on visualization practice including research, aiding user adoption and user support. Her work is interdisciplinary and not only is it communicated through papers but also through new media like virtual environments. Her interests include visual design, information communication and developing novel visualizations. She is a member of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE) where she is a member of the special interest groups for visualization and technology transfer. She acts as a reviewer for three conferences.

Colin Venters is a grid engineer at the National Centre for e-Social Science. He has worked at the University of Manchester since 1999 as a research associate in the Research Computing group on a number of research projects. His scientific interests lie in the field of computer vision, signal and image processing, image databases, pattern recognition, multimedia information retrieval, and information visualization. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He is the Events Officer of the British Computing Society Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group (BCS-HCI).

Tobias Schiebeck is a Grid Engineer at the National Centre for e-Social Science. He has worked as a research software engineer at the University of Manchester since 2000. He was involved in a number of research and development projects in the field of scientific and high performance visualization. His research interests lie in the application of high performance visualization tools and libraries in different subject areas and the interdisciplinary application of standard visualization techniques. He is involved in the teaching of training courses on visualization tools and techniques at Manchester Computing.