Academic advising brings numerous benefits to the mission of Higher Education Institutions. One central and challenging duty of advisors is course recommendation for term planning. This task requires both knowledge of the study programs as well as a thorough analysis of the students’ unique circumstances. Limited time and a large student population make this task overwhelming. As a result, an important body of research has sought to expedite term planning via data-oriented decision-support tools. The impact of such tools on students has been extensively studied. However, the advisors’ perspective remains largely unexplored. We contribute to redressing this gap by studying how a grade prediction tool shapes academic advisors’ approach to course recommendation. We found that while the advisors’ usual strategies tend to prevail, their recommendations largely depend on the advisee’s historical performance. That said, advisors also acknowledge the limitations of grades as a measure of academic success.

A large body of work has sought to create effective ways of communicating and interacting with visual information. This paper presents insights into this research landscape based on the proceedings from the International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI). We analyze several aspects of VINCI’s scholarship, including key contributors, emerging topics, and collaboration and citation patterns. Our findings reveal the dynamic character of VINCI and its advancements, highlighting its interdisciplinary nature with contributions from diverse institutions and countries, with the majority of authors engaging in both domestic and international collaborations. The insights from this study can inform future research directions and support more fruitful collaborations among VINCI researchers.

Appropriate communication and understanding of political data are key to achieve a healthy dialogue between civil society and political institutions. This is particularly important for data generated by bodies that most directly represent citizens, such as congresses, senates, parliaments, and other forms of legislatures. Visualization tools have the potential to support the exploration and understanding of such data and make it more accessible and appealing to the general public. With this vision, we present LegisLatio, an interactive visualization tool that enables open-ended analysis of legislative roll-call vote data from multi-party electoral systems. We describe the design of the tool and illustrate its effectiveness with data generated by the Ecuadorian legislature. We also discuss the findings of a qualitative observation that hints at LegisLatio’s potential to promote citizen engagement and participation.

We present a scrollytelling visualization that explains the concept of “voting power”, which refers to the influence that a group of voters have, relative to the geographical area they live in, on an election’s outcome. We explain this in the context of Ecuador, a country with electoral districts of varied sizes and populations (and, thus, varied voting power). Our visualization is designed to explain that a bigger territory does not necessarily imply more votes. Understanding this concept is particularly important in Ecuador, a country that officially depicts elections results through maps that use color hue to indicate the winning candidate of a given geographical area.