Presented at the 5th Annual ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Austin, Texas (February 27-29, 2004).

I am working on a transcript of the talk. The slides have extensive notes, but I plan to post a complete transcript of the talk (I'm about halfway through). Powerpoint slides alone don't tell you enough. I hope to have the transcript finished by next week.

This talk explores information visualization (InfoViz) from the perspective of information architecture (IA). InfoViz does not have a high profile among IAs. Skepticism dominates. InfoViz is often dismissed as either not ready for primetime, not applicable to IA problems, or as a good idea that hasn't panned out--a failed experiment.

In this talk, I ask the question: is InfoViz a failed experiment or might it yet lead to a future revolution? If it's a failed experiment, then why and what can we learn from it? If it's a future revolution, then what might that future look like? Or does the answer lie, as it so often does, somewhere in the middle?

These two photos are of me presenting the talk at the Summit. The photos are by Javier Valesco. Javier wrote that I had a "roomful", which is true. It was packed and many people sat on the floor. His other caption said that "At some point, you stop needing shoes to impress the audience." Birkenstocks are shoes in my world, but I'm a doctoral student, so my world is a bit different I guess.