Oswego, NY

I spent the first few days of Spring Break still working, as I was scheduled to attend a conference at SUNY Oswego. I was actually excited about seeing Oswego, not only because of my desire to explore the state of New York, but because of the massive snow storm that dumped over 10 feet of snow there last month. Well, the snow melted by the time I arrived and the rest of Oswego was underwhelming. The SUNY campus is right on Lake Ontario, which was quite pretty, but also very cold and windy. It must be brutal to deal with that during the winter, although I'm sure it's really beautiful in the summer.

The conference was called A Conversation between Art and Science on Information Visualization. I was interested in the "information visualization" aspect of it, but I found myself lost between the art and the science. The conference seemed really geared toward artists. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, as a social scientist I felt very out of place. There were certainly some ideas and names thrown about that made some sense to me (e.g., Edward Tufte and Jakob Nielsen), but most of the time I was lost. I like to think about new things and feel challenged by new ideas, but I need to at least be able to grasp some of the basic concepts and I was really struggling in that respect. I don't think it helped that I was burned out and desperate to start Spring Break.