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Special Section >> Inside Purdue's Envision Center

5/26/2005

Envision Garden

AN ENVISION STUDENT uses the Chinese
Garden application in the FLEX environment
and is transported to an Eastern China
garden in the year 1708.

Purdue University’s remarkable center breaks away from the classroom experience and brings true multi-sensory discovery and learning to students.

By Krishna P.C. Madhavan, Laura L. Arns, and Gary R. Bertoline

There is no doubt that the last decade has seen an explosive increase in the quantity of data available for discovery and learning purposes. And this is a good thing—humans do, after all, process their data through a variety of senses: auditory, oral, and tactile senses, plus the sense of sight. Yet, the highly textual nature of traditional datasets has represented a purely visual data form that caters only to a small percentage of the number of methods in which humans can understand data. In other words, most of these large volumes of data are considered to be “perceptually inferior”; says Grok-It Concepts (Grok-It Science; www.medibolt.com/conbottom.htm). This, in essence, is the problem that the field of data perceptualization attempts to address.

What is data perceptualization? Data perceptualization deals with various theoretical and practical techniques that can translate large volumes of data into useful information by allowing, according to Stuart K. Card, “…a richer use of many [human] senses, including sound and touch, to increase the rate at which people can assimilate and understand information” (from “Visualizing Retrieved Information: A Survey,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, March 1996). And Grok-It Science states that while the fundamental principle underlying data perceptualization is intuitive and powerful, it is the process of translating data to overcome “perceptual inadequacy” itself that represents a new and emerging frontier in science and technology.

Bridging Discovery and Learning

That’s where the NSF-funded Envision Center for Data Perceptualization (www.envision.purdue.edu) at Purdue University (IN) comes in. The Center is organized under the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and is an interdisciplinary, high-performance, perceptualization showcase facility to support discovery and learning at Purdue. After all, it has long been understood that “undergraduates need to become an active part of the audience for research” (Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities. The Boyar Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, 1998; naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf), and that “the basic idea of learning as inquiry is the same as the idea of research; even though advanced research occurs at advanced levels, undergraduates beginning in the freshman year can learn through research.