Ninth Workshop on the Philosophy of Information: Information Visualisation

The workshops in the Philosophy of Information bring together various philosophical perspectives on the nature and dynamics of information, and focus in particular on novel philosophical questions that arise in the information society. The central theme for the 9th workshop in the series is information visualisation.

We want to focus on informational artefacts that encode or convey information, study how scientists rely on visualisations, and how visual artefacts are designed. We want to be able to explain why visualisations can play a certain epistemic role and formulate hypotheses about why certain visualisation are more effective than others, but we also want to develop the conceptual resources needed to critically assess design-choices and the conventions that inform these decisions.

With the choice of visualisation as our central theme, we wish to explore convergences between the philosophy of information and the philosophy of science, and deepen existing connections between the formal sciences (logic, computing) and the philosophy of information.

We welcome contributions on the following listed below, and encourage scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds to explore the lines of inquiry we proposed.

Topics of interest

• Extensions and critical evaluations of visualisations as models and as epistemic representations in the context of data-intensive science.
• The epistemology of data and data science in the context of visualisation.
• The logic and epistemology of design in the context of information visualisation.
• Case-studies of specific visualisation-practices or types of visualisations; including drawings, photographs and diagrams.
• Meta-theoretical reflections on the status of theoretical foundations for information visualisation.
• The role of formal methods for the study of visualisation.