CSH journalist-in-residence Aashima Dogra-Freitag shares her personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, and reflections on the Visualizing Complexity Science Workshop
By Aashima Dogra-Freitag
A journalist must pass on verified and meaningful information from their sources to the public. Science journalists have this task plus another. We must also explain the scientific context of what we are reporting on, as our audiences are often non-specialists. With added complexity and the abstractness of research questions that come with dealing with it, we need engaging methods to communicate the science. And visualisation is a big one. This is the reason I was immensely interested in getting involved in the Visualizing Complexity Science Workshop as soon as I heard of it.
I was tasked with photographing the proceedings over the course of one week. Needless to say, I came away from the workshop having learnt a lot. Unexpectedly, it expanded my perspectives on data itself: how data collection shapes the modern world we live in and how we leave traces as we move through our lives.
What follows is a photo/video diary capturing some highlights of the workshop, which took place at CSH in late August.
DAY 1
An Inviting and Insightful Welcome
Liuhuaying Yang and Paul Kahn opened the 3rd round of the workshop (the first one took place in 2023) on Monday, 25th August 2025. A total of 37 participants had gathered at the Springer-Rothschild Palace in Vienna, each of them interested in visualizing complexity. The pool of participants was a rich mix of researchers, analysts, designers, journalists, artists, and developers.
They were instructed not to disturb the sound meter and temperature meter placed in the workshop rooms. These devices would collect data throughout the week, and the result would be a visualization of the workshop’s autographic data at the end.
Guest artist Jonas Bohatsch, who set up an art workstation with mentorship
at the venue, presented a visualisation that he worked on with one group of participants from last year on global supply chain fragilities.
To flag off the workshop, Liuhuaying made a simple yet effective point: research is not the same as data, and vice versa. When trying to communicate the research, the participants could focus on its main findings, instead of only visualizing data.
Fast-Track Networking
Coffee in hand, the participants then circled through rounds of speed-dating-like rendezvous at the newly opened garden of the Springer-Rothschild Palace. Collaborations are fundamental to visualising complexity, and getting to know one another is the first step.
Let's Talk about Science and Art
Lunch was followed by presentations from the scientists whose research work the participants would soon immerse themself in. Lisette Espín-Noboa, a postdoc at CSH working on Algorithmic Fairness, and Daniele Barolo, a PhD candidate part of the Collective Minds group, presented their research and, of course, the corresponding data. The two papers describe research at the hub involving auditing of algorithms using network data. One of them uses LLMs, and another one audits using synthetic networks. The two scientists presented the two papers that the workshop participants were free to choose from for their visualisations.
“In one of the papers presented, our work examines how LLMs recommend academics. We found that these models reproduce real-world biases, for example, the under-representation of women in STEM. They also generate inconsistencies, hallucinations, and additional biases in country of affiliation, seniority, and popularity. We highlight their potential but argue that they are not yet reliable enough to be used as recommender systems without safeguards,” Lisette said.
Just before the participants organized themselves into groups, artist Melinda Sipos inspired the room by showcasing some of her data-based installations. It included her ongoing collaboration with Liuhuaying, titled “Names in Shadow”-an installation on display in one of the workshop rooms. Melinda would be on hand to assist participants through the course of the workshop. Her office stocked with art supplies and a pop-up bookshelf was a step away from the room to guide the teams whenever needed.
DAY 2
Kicking Off with Fresh Ideas
Over the next two days, the teams took shape, the skills started to click together, and the fun began! Each morning, a new injection of fresh ideas came from the guest talks. Jason Forrest raised the bar at the outset when he plunged the question into the workshop room: how do we get people to care (about what you’re visualizing)? His recommendations emerged from the mixture of approaches he has experimented with, ranging from years of data visualizations at McKinsey catering to corporate honchos and the more recent on-the-ground data kiosks he has been working on as Data Vandals with artist and wife Jen Ray.
Journalist Julia Janicki‘s seminal visual stories left the workshop awe-struck.
A large chunk of her work, which she discussed, was rooted in her love and concern for the natural world; hence, it appears to be effortlessly executed yet provocative. There were several lessons in them about strengthening visualizations with a backbone of strong collaborations between illustration, storytelling and front-end development. The whimsical and quietly political All the Ways to Make Taiwanese Bubble Tea, and Taiwan’s Mangoes received much appreciation.
Co-organiser Paul Kahn’s engagement with teams throughout the workshop has been consistently constructive, as he was often seen asking questions as well as answering others. His work on historical visualizations is well-known, and indeed, he prodded and reminded: why reinvent, when we can reimagine? In his talk, ‘glyphs’ or visual markers took center stage, as he described ways these units of data visualization have been used in historical examples.
The teams had a lot to chew on as they presented blueprints of their own visualization tasks. Feedback flew in from all directions as they began to refine their collaborations.
DAY 3
Imagining, Sonifying, Creating
Dietmar Offenhuber delivered a talk on the third day, and succeeded in his aim of expanding horizons. He introduced ‘Physical Reservoir Computing’, an emerging approach to data science, illustrated by his recent work at the Venice Biennale, where water columns processed simple questions, such as what time of day it is, with the input of live video feeds and the output of light signals. “We are too used to thinking about data as evidence that reveals something about the state of the world. But there is also a speculative and imaginative aspect of data, that can bring us closer to the 3rd rung of Judea Pearl’s Ladder of causation that goes higher than seeing (observing), doing (intervention), towards imagining (counterfactuals) what might be possible if things were different.”
Closing the series of guest talks was genre-bending sonification practitioner Miriam Quick, who joined us online and showcased how she has been hitting the sweet spot between Communicating Data, Telling a Story, and Sounding Unique with her project Loud Numbers. Her talk was music to our ears – quite literally, as she has been committed not only to sonifying data but also to making the outputs musical.
Between the fantastic talks and the dedicated time for teamwork over the last two days, the wheels had been turning to bring to life the work of CSH researchers Lisette and Daniele. On the afternoon of the penultimate day, the salon was abuzz with excitement as the final presentations began.
PRESENTATIONS
From Card Games to Coffee Cups
The seven teams brought a variety of perspectives to visualize different aspects of the research they chose. A physical exhibit, supplemented by an immersive installation, highlighted the importance of a diverse and healthy forest. Similarly, another visualization took the form of a card game titled ‘Shroom Boom’ set against the backdrop of an ecosystem derived from species diversity. Another team conjured up Pepper’s Ghost (an illusion technique to make low-tech holograms) in an installation to illustrate that the current LLMs are prone to hallucinations.
Things got a bit meta when the same skills in the room–research, design, software development, and others– became pawns in a digital game based on the principles of changing homophily and heterophily. There was even a sonification in the mix of outputs that combined digital game play with Bouba’s (the majority) and Kiki’s (the minority), whose entry and exit into the game play changed the visual and sound field, as per the findings of one of the papers.
A performance titled ‘Ground Truth’ was performed in the setting of a coffee shop, serving four brews: one of them the ground truth of active physicists and three others based on different flavours of biases repeated by the LLMS: gender, ethnicity, and career age. All three tasted, smelled, and looked very different from the ground truth! Last but not least, all participants crowded into a dark room to experience the installation titled (In)visible Absence, which used projections, invisible ink, and UV light to map a visible and invisible network of physicists.
WRAPPING UP
Sketches, Sensors, and Memories of a Week Together
The workshop concluded with moments of self-reflection, as the teams removed the sheets covering their desks that they had been brainstorming over by sketching, listing, and scribbling notes. Underneath the sheets was a layer of carbon paper, which was removed to unveil an autographic sketch of the week’s worth of teamwork. Arrows and smudges were impressions made through the week, some of them relatable, some of them intriguing.
Only one thing was left to do: to look at what the temperature and noise sensors had recorded. Liuhuaying and workshop volunteer István Korompai had cleaned up the data and worked on a quick visualization that informed us how we had been using the rooms and also, how hot it still was, at the end of summer in 2025.
All the visualisations experienced throughout the week left a lasting impression, more than just a murmur, days after the presentations and performances ended. “Can this stay here forever?” one scientist was overheard, pointing at an installation still on display.
