A large audience and a panel of experts at Gravitational Waves event.

Every AlgoRiThm has ART in it: Treemap Art Project Exhibition by Ben Shneiderman

/ 3 October 2014 /

Ben Shneiderman’s art will be featured in an exhibition at the National Academies Keck Center that opens October 16.

Ben Shneiderman with two of his Treemap Art Project pieces.

From visually depicting points scored and personal fouls of every player in the NBA to detailing the production output of hundreds of U.S. companies, computer-generated treemaps are a potent tool for taking massive amounts of data and producing a compact roadmap of usable information. The brainchild of Ben Shneiderman, a National Academy of Engineering member and Distinguished University Professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, treemaps not only provide a wealth of information for decision-makers worldwide, they’re also attractive to look at.

The Treemap Art Project exhibition that opens on Oct. 16, 2014 at the National Academies features 12 works by Shneiderman.

Shneiderman, a renowned data visualization expert whose work led to Spotfire’s commercial success, pioneered the treemap technique in the early 1990s. Treemaps are used to organize and visualize hierarchical (tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles. In this exhibition, he has stripped the text from his treemaps, allowing viewers to consider their aesthetic properties. The featured treemaps are based on data from a range of topics including global population, popular music, carbon emissions, economic growth, popular TED talks, airport activity, and basketball data.

“Although I conceived treemaps for purely functional purposes (understanding the allocation of space on a hard drive), I was always aware that there were aesthetic choices in making appealing treemaps, such as design, color, aspect ratio, and the prominence of borders for each region, each hierarchy level, and the surrounding box. In addition, certain treemaps are inherently interesting because of the data displayed or patterns revealed,” says Shneiderman, who also holds an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.  Shneiderman worked closely with Kazi Rahman, ’13, master of information management, to prepare the images and the exhibition catalog.

Shneiderman's artistic influences include the Op art (optical art) movement of the 1960s, as well as the work of Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman, and Hans Hofmann.

October 16, 2014        Opening Reception

5:30-6:00 p.m.            Ben Shneiderman will lead gallery tours
6:00-8:00 p.m.            D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous

  • Welcoming remarks and community sharing time. Anyone in the audience working at the intersection of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work.
  • Panelist presentations
    • Jonah Brucker-Cohen, assistant professor of digital media and networked culture, Lehman College, City University of New York
    • Jon Froehlich, assistant professor, Department of Computer Science and affiliate assistant professor, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland
    • Manuel Lima, designer, author, researcher, and lecturer, New York City
    • Ben Shneiderman, member of the National Academy of Engineering and Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland
    • JD Talasek, facilitator; director, Cultural Programs, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
  • Discussion

8:15-9:00 p.m.            Ben Shneiderman will lead gallery tours during a reception.

Location:
National Academies Keck Center
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Cost:
Free and open to the public.
Registration and photo ID required.
http://www.cpnas.org/events/daser-101614.html

The exhibit will be on view from Oct. 16, 2014 through April 15, 2015 at the National Academies Keck Center by appointment. Email aquinn@nas.edu to make an appointment. The exhibit is a project of the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences.

Every AlgoRiThm has ART in it: Treemap Art Project Exhibition
Exhibition catalog with essays by Ben Shneiderman, Manuel Lima and JD Talasek
D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous
Background information on Shneiderman’s Treemap art

Media contact: Abby Robinson, 301-405-5845, abbyr@umd.edu

University of Maryland
College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
2300 Symons Hall, College Park, Md. 20742
www.cmns.umd.edu
@UMDscience

About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 7,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college's 10 departments and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $150 million.

About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences

The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 8,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college's 10 departments and six interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $250 million.