主題講者
Information Visualisation and Visual Knowledge Aggregation as Interdisciplinary Skills. From Da Vinci to Digital Literacy
Andrea Nanetti
Associate Professor, Founding Director of LIBER (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Bookish and Experiential Research), Nanyang Technological University
摘要/Abstract
Existing studies suggest that “information visualisation” is a critical component for digital literature because it allows “users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once” (Thomas & Cook, 2005, p. 30). However, the current learning environment does not provide concrete evidence of interdisciplinary teaching and authentic learning for a diversified academic audience. Instead, teaching practices are segregated in disciplinary silos, for instance, information science, visual communication, human-computer interaction, statistics, finance, where different approaches are experiences by different instructors in the attempt to cope with the faster and faster advancement of technology and industry needs in their own specific fields of interest. This results in a myopic perspective because learners are exposed to ready-made solutions with a date of expiry due to rapid technological obsolescence. The hypothesis is that the advancement of learning should be provided within a broad interdisciplinary foundation on information visualisation and visual knowledge aggregation. A knowledge aggregator “is a knowledge engineering tool that allows its user to assemble information of different kinds from different sources, guided by what the user wants to do with the synthesized whole” (Nanetti et al., 2015, p. 159). Here, the process of "visualisation" must not be seen as a reductive representation to embody or illustrate written narratives but as an investigative tool to discover and organise new relationships between objects and ideas. The practical aim is to build a newly structured course that would serve faculty members from all disciplines to further their interdisciplinary teaching skills in targeting teaching situations, in which (1) students learn the interdisciplinary history of modern visualisation in different disciplines, (2) experiment the design and implementation of visual knowledge aggregations in their respective fields of studies using real-life situations. The expected outcome is to teach how to leverage the treasure of human experiences in the digital age as explicitly conceived in the definition of Heritage Science by Nanetti (2021, p. 8). The course is structured in a way to enable students and teachers to benefit from having the opportunity to be exposed to ill-structured real-life examples and explore them through the lens of the consolidated experiences in visual knowledge aggregation from Leonardo Da Vinci to computational algorithms for information visualisation. The critical pedagogical innovation is that students not only learn this interdisciplinary history but also experiment the design and implementation of visual knowledge aggregations in their respective fields of studies using real-life situations.