The value of multi-disciplinary research lies in the exchange of ideas and methods across the traditional boundaries between areas of study. It could be argued that many of the advances in science and engineering take place because the ideas, methods and the tools of thought from one discipline become re-applied in another.The topic of "the visual" has become increasingly important as advances in technology have led to multi-media and multi-modal representations, and extended the range and scope of visual representation and interpretation in our lives. Under this broad heading there are many different perspectives and approaches, from across the entire spectrum of human knolwedge and activity.The editors and authors of this book aim to break down cross-disciplinary barriers, by bringing together people working in a wide variety of disciplines where visual representations and interpretations are exploited. Contributions come from researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations in a wide variety of areas, including art history, biology, clinical science, cognitive science, computer science, design, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, and sociology.The book provides a forum for wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary contributions on visual representations and interpretations. * Contributors include researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations* Content spans a wide variety of areas including but not limited to biology, sociology, and computer science* Discusses how new technology has affected "the visual" representation of information

The value of multi-disciplinary research and the exchange of ideas and methods across traditional discipline boundaries are well recognised. Indeed, it could be justifiably argued that many of the advances in science and engineering take place because the ideas, methods and the tools of thought from one discipline become re applied in others. Sadly, it is also the case that many subject areas develop specialised vocabularies and concepts and can consequently approach more general problems in fairly narrow, subject-specific ways. Consequently barriers develop between disciplines that prevent the free flow of ideas and the collaborations that on Visual Representations could often bring success. VRI'98, a workshop focused & Interpretations, was intended to break down such barriers. The workshop was held in the Foresight Conference Centre, which occupies part of the former Liverpool Royal Infirmary, a Grade 2 listed building, which has been recently restored. The building combines a majestic architecture with the latest in new conference facilities and technologies and thus provided a very suitable setting for a workshop aimed at bringing the Arts and the Sciences together. of the workshop was to promote inter-disciplinary awareness across The main aim a range of disciplines where visual representations and interpretations are exploited. Contributions to the workshop were therefore invited from researchers who are actively investigating visual representations and interpretations: - artists, architects, biologists, chemists, clinicians, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, educationalists, engineers, graphic designers, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, psychologists and social scientists.

Presents a wide range of graphical representations of some speech signals and allows current speech analysis techniques to be assessed and directly compared. Describes time-frequency representations, auditory modeling, neural networks, pitch and multi-channel analysis. The study of over 40 different analyses of speech is represented in myriad images found throughout.

In the age of big data, being able to make sense of data is an important key to success. Interactive Visual Data Analysis advocates the synthesis of visualization, interaction, and automatic computation to facilitate insight generation and knowledge crystallization from large and complex data. The book provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of visual, interactive, and analytical methods. It introduces criteria for designing interactive visual data analysis solutions, discusses factors influencing the design, and examines the involved processes. The reader is made familiar with the basics of visual encoding and gets to know numerous visualization techniques for multivariate data, temporal data, geo-spatial data, and graph data. A dedicated chapter introduces general concepts for interacting with visualizations and illustrates how modern interaction technology can facilitate the visual data analysis in many ways. Addressing today’s large and complex data, the book covers relevant automatic analytical computations to support the visual data analysis. The book also sheds light on advanced concepts for visualization in multi-display environments, user guidance during the data analysis, and progressive visual data analysis. The authors present a top-down perspective on interactive visual data analysis with a focus on concise and clean terminology. Many real-world examples and rich illustrations make the book accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience from students, to experts in the field, to practitioners in data-intensive application domains. Features: Dedicated to the synthesis of visual, interactive, and analysis methods Systematic top-down view on visualization, interaction, and automatic analysis Broad coverage of fundamental and advanced visualization techniques Comprehensive chapter on interacting with visual representations Extensive integration of automatic computational methods Accessible portrayal of cutting-edge visual analytics technology Foreword by Jack van Wijk For more information, you can also visit the author website, where the book's figures are made available under the CC BY Open Access license.

This volume provides a basic framework for using visual data - namely still photographs - as a tool for social analysis. The authors determine the importance of theoretical assumptions in analyzing these data and provide advice on how to use photographs in cognitive, symbolist and structuralist research. The book is richly illustrated with examples ranging from Native American masks to perfume advertisements.

In Art and Representation, John Willats presents a radically new theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures: the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers, and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence, and Willats begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psycholinguist than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production, and, displaying an impressive grasp of more than one scholarly discipline, shows how the Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee, and David Hockney have put these systems to work. But this book is not only about what systems artists use but also about why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems, and why drawings by young children look so different from those by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. These include the use of anomalous pictorial devices such as inverted perspective, which may be used for expressive reasons or to distance the viewer from the depicted scene by drawing attention to the picture as a painted surface. Willats concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces. Rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in pictures can serve. Like readers of Ernst Gombrich's famous Art and Illusion (still available from Princeton University Press), on which Art and Representation makes important theoretical advances, or Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, Willats's readers will find that they will never again return to their old ways of looking at pictures.

The role of representation in the production of technoscientific knowledge has become a subject of great interest in recent years. In this book, sociologist and art critic Kathryn Henderson offers a new perspective on this topic by exploring the impact of computer graphic systems on the visual culture of engineering design. Henderson shows how designers use drawings both to organize work and knowledge and to recruit and organize resources, political support, and power. Henderson's analysis of the collective nature of knowledge in technical design work is based on her participant observation of practices in two industrial settings. In one she follows the evolution of a turbine engine package from design to production, and in the other she examines the development of an innovative surgical tool. In both cases she describes the messy realities of design practice, including the mixed use of the worlds of paper and computer graphics. One of the goals of the book is to lay a practice-informed groundwork for the creation of more usable computer tools. Henderson also explores the relationship between the historical development of engineering as a profession and the standardization of engineering knowledge, and then addresses the question: Just what is high technology, and how does its affect the extent to which people will allow their working habits to be disrupted and restructured? Finally, to help explain why visual representations are so powerful, Henderson develops the concept of "metaindexicality"—the ability of a visual representation, used interactively, to combine many diverse levels of knowledge and thus to serve as a meeting ground (and sometimes battleground) for many types of workers.