The University of Arizona is celebrating Open Access Week by sponsoring a program on Big Data and Visualization. Big data is becoming an integral part of research, business, government, and our personal lives – in history, science, politics, economics, business, and social media. A prime example is the growth in the volume of data from social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Big data presents many challenges related to its characteristics, processing, management, and visualization.

The speakers for our program are University of Arizona researchers, Joellen Russell from the Department of Geosciences and Department of Planetary Sciences, and Eric Lyons from the School of Plant Sciences and the Bio5 Institute. They both develop and analyze big data as part of their research. We have asked them to address the following questions. How do you visualize the data you develop and analyze? How do you get across the “story” of your data in a way that others can understand your research? What visualization tools do you use? Does big data create specific issues and challenges to making research data openly available? Please join us for this fascinating program.