VFF: Why Visualize? Not Just a Pretty Picture

Why do we create visualizations? Why are they important? True, there are times when we just want to have a fantastically beautiful image that Nature will choose for its cover highlighting our research and making us famous, but visualization is more than that. Visualization provides a means of organising our thoughts. Of getting our head around a subject. Of distilling the essentials out of complex information. In this presentation I will argue that visualization, insight, and discovery go hand in hand, and that pushing the boundaries of visualization can be at least as important as pushing the boundaries of science.I am a toolmaker. I create tools that others can use in order to visualize complex molecular data. Sometimes what I am doing is just trying to do what others have done already, but within my framework; sometimes I am stretching, experimenting, trying to visualize data in ways that have not been done before. Whether it be four-dimensional crystallography, protein ligand binding, or RNA annotation, my goal is to provide new options that researchers and educators can use to gain new insights that otherwise would have been difficult to come by. In this presentation I will share a number of "ah ha!" moments that I and others have experienced in working with Jmol that have convinced me that good dynamic visualizations can change the way we see our work and that many interesting and valuable visualizations are still to be discovered.