 There we go. All right, so welcome to this project briefing. Visualization on the big screen. Hands-on immersive environments designed for student and faculty collaboration. I'm Bryan Sinclair, associate dean for public services at Georgia State University Library. And joining me today are my colleagues, Jill Sexton, head of digital research services at UNC Chapel Hill Libraries. And Joe Hurley, interim director of Curve, collaborative university research and visualization environment at Georgia State University Library. So today we will be discussing visualization walls and software that are accessible to scholars, investigators and learners at all levels and across multiple disciplines. Specifically, we will be looking at new installations and services at UNC Chapel Hill Libraries and Georgia State University Library, both of which provide open labs with advanced equipment that does not require any special knowledge or formatting to operate, allowing users to concentrate on the content, subject matter and collaboration at hand. For the purposes of this talk, we wish to make the distinction between what is commonly called a video wall and what we are calling a visualization wall. A video wall is a configuration of high resolution displays. We are beginning to see them more and more in storefronts, lobbies, museums and some libraries. They often feature digital exhibits with dynamic content, but content that is often pre-formatted for a particular aspect ratio, display size or portion or portions of the display area. A visualization wall as we are defining it is an interactive research tool. It too is a configuration of high resolution displays, but one that allows a team of users, in our case students, faculty and staff, to use software applications to create and interact with new visual content in real time without the need of special training, pre-formatting or staff mediation. The word wall is unfortunate. As you will see from our examples today, we see immersive visualization technologies as having the potential to break down walls between disciplines and individuals, between users and new ways of seeing. So many of our campuses have these large, high resolution video walls already. They may be found in departmental research labs or in specialized centers. They're often funded or designed for a specific application or purpose, and access may be limited and usually is to faculty and grad students within that particular area or research lab. Past CNI briefings and workshops have explored the new trend of digital scholarship centers in libraries, which in some instances include these large video displays for enhanced data visualization. The visualization wall in the library is a fairly new breed. It's found somewhere where research data services and the growing area of digital scholarship services meet. Locating these types of centers in central neutral spaces like the main campus library or libraries, Joan Lippincott has noted can provide increased access to all members of the campus community, including undergraduate researchers. Many of us are familiar with the so-called spatial turn that has occurred in the digital humanities and other disciplines, with growing interest in GIS and mapping, but also in data visualization, 3D modeling, photogrammetry, and advances in virtual reality that are being applied in exciting and creative ways across a wide range of fields. It should be pointed out that a lot of this is becoming very mainstream quickly. Google Earth, of course, has been a game changer and is an incredible tool for most of us in multiple disciplines, but virtual reality is also becoming mainstream very quickly and can help us understand our world and relate to it spatially. I can currently take an immersive virtual walking tour of the Palace of Versailles or fly through a virtual downtown Chicago with my phone and a Google Cardboard set if you're familiar with that. If you're not Google, Google Cardboard is pretty interesting technology for about 10 bucks. But visualization walls can encourage new types of connections, collaborations, and ways of seeing, such as viewing multiple images side by side in almost microscopic detail or for contrast and comparison. I was first introduced to this technology and how it can support new forms of visual and digital scholarship a couple of years ago through an interesting video from Brown University Library featuring University Librarian Harriet Hamasi. In it she described how their digital scholarship lab, which I'll give you some specifics, features a 16 by seven foot wall comprised of 12 55 inch higher resolution LED screens. But this allows students and faculty to be present in data. That was her word. I made note of that when we were planning our space at Georgia State and allowing them to analyze single objects, images, maps, and texts in greater detail than ever before. And by the way, that image is some archeologists at Brown University and their digital scholarship lab. So thank you, Brown, for letting us use that image. Another example here is of being present in data at this time in the sciences. This is actually a model of a protein created using VMD visual and molecular dynamic software. And this, you can see from this image, it's very complex, too complex to be on a normal screen and your display in your office or even a dual to screen screen. But this is, in this particular model, you can move it, you can turn it, you can actually go inside of it and fly inside and out. And as you can see the complexity there. So it's not just our spatial, spatial data can also be internal spatial data as well. So, and, but ultimately, it is the social and collaborative aspect that draws us to the big screen and where new connections are made together. This suggests a new role for the library of the future, campus destination where investigators at all levels and across multiple disciplines can come and relate spatially and be physically present in data. And now I'll turn it over to my colleague Jill Sexton and I have your slide queued up. So good afternoon everyone. Thanks for coming to hear us talk. I'm excited to talk to you a little bit about how we're supporting data visualization technologies at UNC Chapel Hill. I'm first gonna give a brief overview of very brief explanation of the goal of our research hub which is the center that houses this technology. I'm going to talk again very briefly about a bit of the planning we did when we were deciding what technologies to bring in to the library and what technologies to support. And finally I'm gonna spend the majority of my time talking about use cases we've seen rising out of this technology. Use cases in data driven instruction, digital humanities, virtual field trips and learning communities. So very quickly in 2013 the library's completed a new five year strategic plan and in that plan we recognize the need to support the full research life cycle. So I think we are used to hearing that libraries have traditionally been concerned with the collection and preservation of the cultural and scholarly record. But today we have to do a lot more than simply collect scholarly outputs which has been our traditional strength. We have to also support the process of scholarship. And for UNC Chapel Hill that means to us we were dedicated to providing researchers with space, hardware, software and the expert information assistance they needed to successfully conduct their research and manage these new kinds of research results. The research hub at UNC is the UNC library's answer to this need. So the Hub at Davis Library opened in August 2014. We, with very little budget, reorganized spaces, services and staff to create centers of expertise in campus libraries. The core features of our research hub are again access to our outstanding collections or traditional strength. But additionally access to skilled staff, spaces for collaboration, creation and presentation of research and information, leading edge technologies, training and support to use those technologies and events and workshops, events to showcase faculty and student research and workshops to teach people how to use tools. We have three locations with services targeted distinct user populations. For the purpose of this talk I'm gonna be focusing on the research hub that's located in Davis Library. That provides support for cross-disciplinary data-oriented research. The services that we focus on in Davis Library are GIS services, numeric data services including data prep and data cleanup in preparation for visualization of data, data management and curation services, data visualization and support for digital humanities consulting. So early in our planning process we knew that a visualization screen or a visualization wall was going to be an important feature of our research hub. And we had a few requirements though that guided the selection of our ultimate choice. The first was, to be honest it was our budget. We were working on a real shoestring budget, we didn't have a lot of money and so we had to choose something that was very economical. We knew that we couldn't hire any additional staff so we had to work with existing staff expertise. And because the implementation of our research hub was extremely flexible, any solution that we purchased we wanted to take advantage of that flexibility. So we wanted to be able to move the thing if we needed to move it. If it wasn't working out the way we expected we wanted to be able to repurpose the pieces that we purchased to put it together and do something else with them. If it worked really well we wanted to be able to build on it and expand it. Based on feedback from other departments on campus that had built similar large displays and colleagues in other libraries who have built these sorts of things. We also knew that we wouldn't have staff resources to create custom content for a specialized wall. So we wanted a solution that would self generate content that people could walk up to and kind of choose their own path or choose their own adventure. And again we wanted a desire for an open platform that we could put out there that people could use and that we wouldn't have to mediate the use of it. So we ended up selecting a product called the Liquid Galaxy. It's built on open source technology developed by Google, Google Projects. We selected it because it built on our strengths in GIS. We're a very, very strong GIS library. It's somewhat limited in what it displays but what it does it does very well. It displays Google Earth and Google Street View. It has the capability to display panoramic photos and videos and most importantly for us it was in our budget. So given a larger budget I think we would have loved to install something and gave us a bit more flexibility but that said we were really thrilled with the response that we've gotten from the campus community with our Liquid Galaxy. So we have seen, we saw immediate engagement with the Liquid Galaxy literally from the instant we had it installed. So the guy who came and set it up for us was still packing up his tools and students were already using it. So in contrast to similar displays on campus our display is in a highly trafficked public area completely open building. We get over a million visitors per year. A lot of people are walking by seeing it. As Brian mentioned other similar technologies on campus are in locked rooms in departmental buildings require mediation to use them if you're able to use them at all. What we've seen over the past not even a year, half a year the Liquid Galaxy display has become a social hub in the library and on campus. It's been referenced in a variety of student publications. You're probably experiencing tour season on your campuses it's tour season at Carolina. So the tour groups or prospective students coming through the library they're all making stops at the Liquid Galaxy giving it a test. What you see in this picture is something that you see literally all the time the hands up, the pointing. This woman is pointing to that building she's probably saying this is where I grew up. This is what people do all the time. So you kind of see people saying oh that's my childhood home there's my bedroom or you know this is where I went to study a broader. This is where I went on my summer vacation. So I think it's important to highlight that in addition to the more scholarly and research oriented use cases I'm going to talk about next. These kinds of uses these impromptu social kind of community building activities. You really can't underestimate the value that they bring to the library of having people who maybe normally wouldn't come in you know take an interest in stuff that we've got in the library. For us it's particularly beneficial because this is located smack in the middle of our research that has computer labs it has you know services presentation spaces. So it draws people into our service point it lets them know what we're doing it gets them engaged and interested and lets them know about other kinds of services that we offer. So again talking about more research oriented uses of the display. We've already seen some faculty members taking advantage of this new technology to redesign assignments or long term projects. So the example I'm about to talk about I'm particularly fond of because it brings together so many of the services that we intentionally group together in our Davis Library research hub. And I think it really beautifully illustrates the power that these large displays can have on teaching and learning. So this case study is an intro level human geography course. They spent the semester learning about a variety of topics in human geography. Things like development globalization and urban structures. They study these concepts using qualitative and quantitative methods. And their final project was developed in collaboration with one of our GIS librarians Amanda Henley. It was a case study on Brazil. So our library staff worked with the students to acquire and format raw data that included a large number of socioeconomic variables for Brazil. So and they worked in groups. Students worked in groups in the library to examine a chosen concept like demographic change or something like that. And the process of working with this raw data served multiple learning outcomes related to locating understanding and managing data. I think that's a growing focus in Carolina on campus. Kind of data literacy, getting students to actually work with raw data and understand it. So as part of this assignment, it was a long term assignment, students attended workshops taught by library staff to learn how to make interactive web maps that help them analyze the data. They could work on their maps on our GIS workstations. And we had student consultants available to help them if they should encounter any difficulty completing their assignments. What you see here is some sample maps created by students that show state level and municipal level distributions of the same data points. This one I believe is about garbage collection and municipalities in Brazil. And based on trends they found in their data and the maps, students chose destinations for virtual field trips using the liquid galaxy. It allowed them to do an unstructured exploration of sites that they were interested in looking, taking a closer look at. And so by kind of navigating from one block to the next or from one city to a few miles out in the country, they were able to discuss evidence and aspects of different kinds of urban development, rural development, things like the impact of colonialism on the landscape. And so, yes they could go to Google Earth on their computer and look at the same thing, but the immersive nature of a large display really increases the impact of the virtual tour and drove home to the students the concepts that they spent an entire semester learning about. The next case study is a digital humanities project called Driving Through Time, the Digital Blue Ridge Parkway. This is a collaborative project between UNC Libraries and Anne Wisnind, who's a faculty member in history at UNC. So Anne selected historic maps from library collections that show the planning and construction process for the Blue Ridge Parkway. The library's contribution, we digitized the maps, geo-referenced them and overlaid them on Google Earth and prepared them for display in the liquid galaxy. I think that immersive displays like this give viewers a different perspective on historic maps because they kind of drape over the landscape and follow the elevation. In this project in particular, you're able to see things that you wouldn't see in a flat map. So you're able to see how, for instance, the roadway traces the contour of the landscape. You can compare early versions of the plan for the Blue Ridge Parkway to what it really turned out to be in current time. And I think also it's a valuable illustration because we have these maps available as a kind of gallery on the liquid galaxy. Users can see them. It makes people more aware of historic library collections and it also makes people more aware of what's possible for them to do in their own research. Another quick, just kind of example that touches on the first one that I gave, we're seeing a lot more faculty members now coming in and kind of modifying their courses that look at foreign lands or areas that aren't in our area to create these virtual field trips for their students. So for instance, in Asian studies, we've had faculty members teaching courses on Vietnam come in and show the effect of the terrain on settlement patterns, show the structure of cities, modern versus ancient cities or show ancient temples that they had talked about in class but you can actually see the context for when you look at them in this large display. Environmental studies is another popular one. Faculty member came in who was interested in showing the impact of extractive resource industries on the landscape in South America. When you can see it in a large scale, you can see the effect of acres and acres, thousands of acres of continuous rainforest that have been decimated to accommodate these industries. It's really striking, really makes a big impact. Final virtual field trip example, this is kind of a neat one. This photo depicts an area of Iceland's coast that an MFA student in studio art discovered when she was on a virtual field trip with our GIS librarian Amanda Henley. The student's a sculptor and she draws inspiration from the intersection of ice and rock in natural settings and she was planning a research visit to Iceland and she made an appointment with Amanda to help scout out locations that she might wanna visit when she actually goes to Iceland. So that was a use that we hadn't really thought about before for this technology. So finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about learning communities that we are seeing springing up around this technology. So this is a photo that was taken at a recent event hosted by the Davis Research Hub. This particular event was organized and facilitated by the student staff who run our service desk or who staff our service desk. It was a humanitarian mapathon conducted under the umbrella of the humanitarian open street map team. This team, and this is a quote, applies the principles of open source and open data sharing for humanitarian response and economic development. So they use a crowdsourcing model to expand available mapping data for under mapped areas of the world. Our group was asked to contribute infrastructure data like roads, paths and buildings for Dar es Salaam, the city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It's one of the fastest growing cities in Africa and there's a lack of good map data available for that city. It's very prone to flooding and the Red Cross specifically asked for more mapping data to aid in future relief efforts for the city. One of the interesting things about open street map is that it's kind of a live participatory open source model. So data that you create and contribute to open street maps are available within minutes to anyone who views that same area in the future. I think this immediate impact that they were having on the map of the world really energized participants. They loved the fact that they were contributing valuable data to a global open source map of the world and that the work that they were doing from a library in Chapel Hill would help humanitarian organizations better respond to disasters in the future. I think that events like this, which really people have a really high level of emotional investment in what they're doing are great for the library to get involved in. I think it was a really, one of the most energizing and exciting events that we've had this whole academic year in the hub. We're definitely gonna be doing more of those in the future. And my final example, a community of practice is in 3D imagery and photogrammetry. So this is a photograph of one of our faculty members of Anthropology working during a three-day long 3D imaging workshop with Rachel Oppitz of the University of Arkansas. So again, she taught this three-day long workshop in our space that taught people how to do this photogrammetry technique. And following that workshop, a community of practice sprung up around this idea. People were really captivated by it. And now there's a regular working group, meetings rotate around different spaces around campus, including Davis Library or Science Library and various different creator spaces on Earth, on Earth, on campus. And my final slide, I thought it was fitting to end with a picture of the old well, a symbol of UNC Chapel Hill. This is a photograph that was taken only a few weeks ago. They show one of the participants in that workshop, a faculty member in Anthropology, photographing the old well to create a 3D model to display on the web. So these techniques that were learned in the workshop were actually being used in real life. So I hope that these examples go to show to you that it's possible to have a big impact on campus with your students without having to dedicate a big budget to these technologies. So everything that we've implemented here is relatively affordable, much if not most of it is open source and really puts visualization technologies and immersive displays within reach for those who have modest budget. So that concludes my part. I'm gonna turn it over to Joe who's gonna talk about Georgia State's curve. So I'm Joe Hurley. I'm the interim director of Curve at Georgia State University Library. And I'm very pleased to talk about Curve. I'm gonna talk about a little bit about what Curve is and then I'm gonna show some examples of how people are using this new space. So Curve is a new research space in the Georgia State University Library. It opened in fall of 2014. So we haven't even been open to full semesters yet. The space is open to all of the GSU community. So it's open to undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty. You just, if you have a, you know, just come on in. And if you come by, you're welcome to come in too. So while it has an amazing visualization wall as it's centerpiece technology, so it has like a 24 foot wide visualization wall that's touch enabled, but really Curve is more than just a visualization wall. It is a research center with many high end PCs. We have very high end Macs. We have a Linux area for people doing research computing. We have several 3D scanners, not printers, but 3D scanners who are about to acquire a Ferro terrestrial 3D scanner as well. And we have a lot of collaborative workspaces and staff support. So what you're looking at right here on the slide is just kind of a floor plan of Curve. And if you see that kind of band there in the middle and it was kind of hard to read, but that is the 24 foot wide visualization wall that we call the interact wall. And then you can see all the collaborative workstations on the periphery and other other spaces within Curve, which is a really nice research space. So one of the ideas behind Curve was to create this space where students and faculty could work on their research projects, get assistance from staff, and then visualize their projects on the interact wall. And so most facilities that have visualization walls, I've seen many. And it seems to be that most of them do not have workstations or staff support in the same space. So often what happens is that these really nice visualization walls or rooms or what have you are divorced from the research and creation process. So what I'm gonna do here is gonna show some examples of how Curve, I think, really creates this whole research suite where people can do the research, can create the content in the space with assistance from staff, and then use the wall to visualize their research or use the wall to actually do research. And I'm not gonna talk about the technical specs. Well, it's obviously very interesting. You can go to the Curve site, just curve.gsu.edu and all the technical specs are there. If you're interested in our planning and design process, we have a whole separate page linked from there with all the information you could ever want. If you want more information, happy to talk with you about it. But so I'm gonna show some slides here that show how Curve really has become a research data visualization and content creation space. And these slides, these images I'm gonna show you, none of these are staged. These are all, my office is in the space. So if something interesting is happening, I just take my camera out there and snap a photo. So I'm gonna talk about them in different categories. The first few examples that I have demonstrate how Curve and the interact wall are being used for research applications. So what you're looking at here is the chair of the Geosciences Department on campus using the software that we have installed on the interact wall. It's called Coralizer or Coral Wall. So this is part of a Smithsonian Institute's Human Origins project where they're looking at these core samples from different places in Africa and looking at how environmental changes have impacted human evolution. And so I did Fib a little bit. This is the one staged image. The chair of the Geosciences Department was really, really wanted to share this with his colleagues. So he kind of set that up. And but here he is looking at a core sample there and he has the students who are on this research team come in here and use the wall because they're able to see so much at once and to zoom in and see these different periods where they can't do it, you know, even if they had like two large screens side by side, it's a completely different experience in here. So they're coming here not just to visualize their project, but they are actually doing research using the wall. Here's another example of research being done using the interact wall. Here we have on the left side a geography professor and her student in the middle working with a curve fellow. So this is a graduate student that works in curve who is kind of a specialist in photogrammetry or structural promotion, like taking 2D images and creating 3D models. So the structural promotion is probably going to be a pretty big thing coming up. I suspect. But here they are working here. So they're using the interact wall, they're using our hardware as in the space and they're using our staff support here to create this 3D model of a river basin. And then here's another research application where we have, again, the students you're looking at here are curve fellows. So some of them are graduate students and some are undergraduate students. They're actually creating a digital project here at Georgia State University Library. We have a lot of digitized and geo-referenced city planning maps of Atlanta. So what they did was they went through and they got all the ones that showed transit lines over time from the 1920s to the present day and they extracted all those transit line proposals and created this really nice digital project where you can see the evolution of transit in Atlanta. And here they're using our mini wall. This is an 84-inch 4K touch display as well. And so now, obviously, when you have a nice large visualization wall, people always want to hold workshops in your space, which is great. So here we have a Tableau workshop. So now I'm not really talking about research applications, I'm gonna talk about workshops. So this is a, people from Tableau came in and held a Tableau workshop, which is very well attended. Here we have a National Geographic funded mapping and GIS workshop that was held by a faculty member on campus. This is a workshop for high school educators. And here we have a Georgia State librarian who also works in Curve. She's a data services and quantitative data services librarian. So here we have our librarian giving a workshop in Vivo in the space. And so we have, obviously, a lot of people, the space is so inviting, a lot of people want to use it for different purposes. We have a lot of classes come in and use it for different reasons. And here we have a graphic design class in the space, holding, the professor is holding a critique of their work. And he comes in here several times a semester already. And critiques of students work. So here, this is the only space where he can bring up like six of their projects that they're working on and talk about them all in the space. And so she's the whole class here attending the critique. Here is an anthropology professor holding a class, just like a one-time class in Curve. And this is very similar to what my colleague Jill was saying, people come in here and do these kind of virtual tours. So this anthropology professor specializes in Mayan, Mexico. And so he has, he's showing them Google Earth right now and showing them a lot of the different Mayan sites in Mexico. And there were like thousands of sites that came up on this map. And then he zooms into one site right here using some 360 degree images. So he kind of zoomed in to show them one site. And then he zoomed in even closer on that same site to show them how steep the walls are there and like the staircases going up to these temples. So he was using it as a virtual tour for the class because obviously they all can't go down to the site. So this was a really fantastic class. I actually sat there and watched some of it. It was so interesting. And then here's another example of people using the space, not just the interact wall, but using the collaborative workstations. So again, this is like a whole kind of research suite. So here we have some political science class using the collaborative workstations. They're using a database that was developed at Georgia State called the Robinson Country Intelligence Index. And so this professor is teaching them how to use the database to assess political stability and in different countries and look at investment opportunities across the globe. And so here, that same class. So some of the students were set up there at the collaborative workstations. And then here, one group set up at the interact wall and they were using, you can see what they're doing here. One of the laptop there is running the Robinson Country Intelligence Index database. And then on the interact wall, they're looking at Google Earth, to check out the countries that they're looking at. And then they're also working on their presentation at the same time. And here's another example. This is something that I've found to be probably one of the more interesting things that has gone on in Curve this semester. This is, and the reason why I find it interesting is it's using so many different things on campus. This is a class, a digital humanities class, a materials culture class in the English department. They're coming into Curve to create 3D models of an anthropology collection that we have at the anthropology department at Georgia State where they have these artifacts that were found when they dug to build public transit in Atlanta. There was like a dump from like the 1890s that they found. So it has all these really interesting Atlanta artifacts here. So this professor is using some staff support in Curve to learn how to use photogrammetry methods to create 3D models of these actual artifacts. And she's discussing what that means in terms of material cultures. So here, students are using the entire space here for this class. Here we have a student taking photographs of those artifacts that were found in the dig site. Here we have a Curve fellow teaching them how to create 3D models. You can see the actual artifact on the table there. They took photos of it and they're running it through the software program that we have in Curve called Agisoft that creates these 3D models. Here is an image of the whole, the entire class kind of working together. And then we have that Curve fellow walking around the space guiding them through the process. And then here is an example of a 3D model that was created from this class. So this is like a jug that was found in the dig site, which is great to visualize on the wall. And then I'm gonna conclude with a couple examples of how the space is just being used spontaneously unplanned, unscheduled. So we have, because Curve is open, just to the whole campus, just like at UNC, anyone can come in and use the wall if it's not in use or not about to be used for a scheduled purpose. So we have people come in all the time and just start playing with the interact wall. And this is a graduate student, several graduate students in bioinformatics. And they came in and just started pulling up different content. I'll be honest with you, I do not know what they were looking at. But I saw it and I thought it looked very interesting. So I took a couple photos and they were talking about bioinformatics in no way my area. Talked to me about urban stuff, but not bioinformatics. But this is just an example of people can come in and then just start using the space. And then here's another final conclude with this example. This is a researcher who was invited to Georgia State University to give a talk to the entire campus, in our large conference area. And they came by later to show him a curve and he was very excited about the space and just pulled up some of his content and gave just kind of a spontaneous mini talk and people kind of gathered around. This was in no way planned, but he just found it so interesting and he had his content with him and he just started talking about it again. So kind of in conclusion, these video walls or visualization walls, where we want to call them, they really do, they bring people into the library. They allow people to engage with content in different ways and it really immerses people in the content that they're using or creating in the space. And so that will end with questions.