Welcome to the homepage of Lydia Byrne, University of Queensland PhD student, budding visualization designer and obsessive whiteboard user. I'm in my 2nd year of a PhD looking at how to choose a visualization that works for a given analytic task and user. This website is a collection of my research papers, my experiments building visualizations with D3js and other visualization related things I do. You can also find me lurking on twitter @lydiacbyrne.

Research:

Conventions and Figurative Shapes in Visualization

I'm very excited to be presenting at the VIS2015 conference in Chicago 25-30 October. My talk explores how data visualizations and infographics leverage their audience's experience to create meaning. If you're at the conference I'll be speaking on Thurs in the 8:30-10:10 InfoVis session. If you're not lucky enough to go to VIS2015 you can check out my research in paper form:

L. Byrne, D. Angus, and J. Wiles, "Acquired Codes of Meaning in Data Visualization and Infographics: Beyond Perceptual Primitives," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 22(1), 2016. [PDF].

The talk will be recorded, and I'll include a link to the video as soon as it's up.

The paper involves content analysis of visualizations from the kantar information is beautiful awards 2014 showcase. If you're interested in the codes we used as part of the content analysis process, you can find them here.

Visualizations of Language

I'm also an affiliate member of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL). As part of the centre I have been exploring different ways to visualize different aspects of language. I also wrote and ran a tutorial back in August on the basics of D3js for CoEDL members.

CoEDL Visualization Workshop D3 Tutorial:

• Example visualizations of language data to explore:
  • A simple word recurrence plot (alt1, alt2)
  • An interactive table of Murrinhpatha, based on data provided by John Mansfield
  • A chord diagram (alt1, alt2)
• Tutorial resources:
  • The tutorial instructions and other resources can be found here
• Other visualizations you may be interested in:
  • An interactive table for visualizing lexemes
  • A multi-panel force directed graph of similarity between verb inflections in different Murrinhpatha classes (thanks to John Mansfield for the data)
  • A parallel coordinates based visualization of the same Murrinhpatha and Russian paradigms.

Please send any feedback on the tutorial to me at l.byrne2 "at" uq.edu.au

Other visualization things I've coded so far:

• The VFR Atlas
• An animated guide to the VFR category (see VFR Atlas for details)
• An arc plot and a stream graph of the same conversation
• A chord diagram
• A set of variations on a donut chart to show:
  • communication instances
  • decision moments
  • NDM decision moments