Dear InfoVis. I love you. I’m so sorry that I killed you.

I first heard about you in 2000, when Andre Skupin took his motorcycle up to Salt Lake City and offered some Cartographic Perspectives. We first met in Baltimore, in 2006, where I was wowed by your energy, the creative complexity, the buzz of discussion and the quality of ideas. The first person I bumped into was an academy award winner - we didn’t have those in Geographic Information Systems. Then I met the guy who invented the mouse! Free apples! This was a different World. I chaired a session and was excited by the quality of questions, the interaction. My ambition was to get a poster at the meeting next year. Might that be possible? It seemed a challenging proposition, but I was motivated to shoot for the stars.

I brought some friends along in 2007 having been surprised to get two papers accepted. Sitting up front with Jo as we presented geoWigs (I still love these) and mashups (but this is the one that gets cited) in Sacramento before we camped in Yosemite and climbed to Glacier Point was about as good as academic work could get. But best of all was the Art Exhibition - an explosion of possibility, curated and presented with enthusiasm and flair. Jaw dropping. Golan Levin, Fernanda Viegas, Ben Fry - thank you. It’s inspired me for over a decade and it’s still here!
http://www.flong.com/projects/ieee07/

We have bumped into each other every year since then. There are so many good memories: Tamara Munzner - a behatted, blue streaked, force of nature doggedly, knowingly holding somebody, everybody, to account at the mic, which she approached with a smile and a swagger - who was this woman?; Jack van Wijk describing something so elegant, so brilliant and so simple with such understatement; Jessica Hullman, in her Friday morning slot, as I settle down with a coffee and a bagel, astounding me with great ideas thoroughly considered, deeply persuasive, beautifully presented; the incomparable Nathalie Riche and her matrix hybrids at Sacramento; Jeff Heer, a shooting star of brilliant ideas, that he’s actually implemented, reliably, and made available to everybody else - building things we could all use, that were deeply considered and fitted together in ways that made sense; Fernanda Viegas - Martin Wattenberg - Fernanda Viegas - Martin Wattenberg - Fernanda Viegas. How do they do that? So impressive, so entertaining, so informative; Crazy fast forwards, incredible art shows, rooftop parties, fabulous discussions with fantastic people, from Seattle to Paris, from Berlin to Vancouver. So many others. So many heroes.

Since 2006, you have given me the opportunity to present 20 papers. These are ideas that I have been involved in shaping and developing, all stimulated and informed by my ongoing interactions with you. I have been lucky enough to meet and work with great collaborators across the World through our time together - in Paris, Utah, Eindhoven, Melbourne, Calgary and closer to home. In terms of my own contributions, I remember with great fondness my nerves when placing post-cards on empty seats in a huge hall before the Sketchy Rendering paper, and the buzz in a packed room as our ideas were presented; Sitting up front in Berlin as Ethan described the herd of cats that he had tamed and juggled in the Creativity Workshops paper - miaow!; Wouter’s much-rehearsed pause between “Small Multiples”, and “with Gaps” as we tried to make an important point about spatial positioning (nice paper, great idea, terrible scheduling, little influence, have a look!); Aidan doing some live Java debugging as his talk started in Columbus; Seeing colleagues who I had supervised to PhDs present for the first time - David, Sarah - and feeling great pride; Jo’s seemingly seminal (you decide) literate visualization speech; Cycling past cacti in the Arizona desert with a line of lycra-clad visualization folks strung out behind me; The honour of engaging with Stu Card, Jock Mackinlay and Ed Chi through Test of Time as I handed them Yvonne Jansen’s beautiful data sculptures; The joy of tweeting something that was funny enough to get a like from Arvind S (remember Twitter?); Hijacking WiFi in the dark while on a park bench outside a locked Newcastle University as I tried to submit a 2008 paper 5 minutes before the deadline; Wondering whether we had dug too deep (challenging your established epistemology?!) before Miriah’s Criteria for Rigor talk at Vancouver and feeling relieved and delighted by the acceptance that we seemed to receive; and actually getting to say Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch in my vizLegends presentation in Salt Lake City in 2010. I’m not sure we have heard much about it since?

People who can speak Welsh as impressively as that soon get asked to serve on conference committees. I worked with great colleagues on posters and made a map of the poster hall! It was then a joy, a privilege and an education to serve with Chris Weaver, Jeff Heer and Helwig Hauser as papers chair for two years - what fantastic and inspiring people. And then I got asked to serve on the SC and be an SC representative on the VEC (whatever those were). This started with breakfast with Ben Shneiderman, Tamara Munzner and Matt Ward in Paris. Wow! I acted as liaison between SC and OC for a few years. But it’s pretty hard work volunteering on these things. It’s invisible unless you make a mistake. And we all do. Sorry about those. Usually you need to spend hours writing documents and sending emails and connecting people. Sometimes you need to stand on tables and shout. Sometimes that’s not enough. But, over the years, I hope I have managed to connect people and ideas together and push you gently in directions that have been largely beneficial. We now have regular SC meetings - we used to only meet at the conference; Test of Time awards - intended to encourage retrospection, to learn from the past and set high targets for future work; data informed decision-making; more explicit descriptions of roles and criteria; an InfoDump - though we need a new name; a code of conduct; a continuing Arts programme; diversity scholarships; greater diversity in committees; open practice positions; a remote online presence; fairer processes, more transparency and more consistency between conferences.

And that’s how I killed you.
My final act.
One of a horde of assailants looking to move on to something bigger and better.
But even as you gasp your final glorious breaths, know this.
Bringing the conference together as VIS is an act of love.
We’re all trying to keep the best of what we see in you.

And actually, now I know you, I understand that you’re not a conference at all. You’re a culture. A culture that we all contribute to, that contains the ideas and energy and personalities of the past but also brings in new ideas, new approaches, new expectations and levels of quality, new debates. Actually, you are not really about the personalities and the stars… you’re about the quality of the body of work and the collective ambition to move things forwards – effectively, creatively, ambitiously, visually, surprisingly and with diversity. That’s why I love you so much.

The memories will fade a little.
But the future is dazzling.
Information visualization is more relevant, more important, more known, more understood, more used and more accessible than ever before.
And so there is plenty to do.
I hope your culture continues, inspires VIS, and helps us all learn more interesting things and do more interesting stuff.
The energy in the community, and the ideas I see in my first virtual encounter with you, my last InfoVis, give me plenty of confidence that it will.

But, whatever happens,
I’ll never forget you,
and what you have done for me.

Thank-you InfoVis - inspiring, enabling, beguiling, enriching.
Everlasting?
I'll always love you.

J.x

Addendum 28/10/20

I was a little surprised by how many people sxeemed to read this piece!
It was quickly written through the tears - so I went back and checked through again.
It was heartfelt, so I didn't want to change anything much if I could help it, but I fixed a typo or two and re-phrased a couple of times where the message was less than clear.

Fact Check! It's only 19 InfoVis papers - I had one at VAST and one was a TVCG thing. Ouch.

Also there are obviously many, many omissions - but one is particularly important and this needs to be rectified. I was introduced to the InfoVis programme committee by the living legend that is Alan MacEachren. I think he was too busy or something, so he drafted me in. Impossible shoes to fill! But that's how I got roped in to chairing a session on geovisualization in Baltimore, and that's how I got to see what an exciting community this was, and that's where the motivation to try to get involved was rapidly sparked. Alan was an immensely inspiring chair of the International Cartographic Association's Commission on GeoVisualization from 1995 onwards. I joined as a PhD student and loved the annual workshops at which we developed ideas about maps and mapping and produced special issues of various journals in cartography and GIScience - Barcelona, Helsinki, Gävle, Melbourne, all over. Happy memories there too. Alan was always incredibly open and supportive and had such rich knowledge and fantastic ideas. The creativity in those ICA GeoViz sessions was infectious. So - thanks Alan for introducing me to InfoVis. And I'm sorry that I killed the thing in the end.