International Workshop on Visualization and Collaboration (VisualCol 2014)

In many collaborative situations, multiple distributed users simultaneously interact with and analyze complex information while sharing their results with others. It is through such collaboration that multiple users bring their expertise to bear on a particular problem to analyze incomplete information and reach collaborative decisions. Such collaboration is far more effective when users collaborate by interacting with meaningful visualizations that accurately depict shared information. Visualizations must present information in a manner that is easily understood by individuals with different expertise and perspectives on the problem at hand. Users must be able to interact with the visualization to highlight or manipulate information in a natural way that is readily observed by other participants. At the same time it is also important to understand the collaborative processes that users in collaborative environments carry out, and the outcomes of these processes, particularly in large-scale collaborations such as wikis, blogs, micro-blogging (twitter, identica etc), social networking and other Web 2.0 collaborative environments. Visualizations of collaborative structures, processes and outcomes help researchers, site administrators and end-users to perceive such patterns that are otherwise difficult to perceive given the vastness of the information involved. This workshop on Visualization and Collaboration – to be held as part of the 2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2014) – will have a dual focus on visualization and its role in collaboration, as well as visualization of collaboration. The objective is to highlight key issues and solutions for visualization in and of collaborative environments. We invite original contributions from researchers and practitioners in academia, government, and industry in this emerging visualization specialty.