"Eclipse"
This eclipse-themed exhibit explores the nature of truth – framing it as something that can be captured in a dynamic, moving form as well as a momentary snapshot. The collection features an animation of UVA’s publication history over the last 15 years to represent this dynamic motion, accompanied by two posters of sunburst plots detailing the publication data of prestigious R1 institutions over the past decade to capture the momentary.
In the Dawn of Discovery, the poster focuses on a central sunburst plot that acts as a legend for the broader project. The plot is divided into four primary domains (health, social, physical, and life sciences), with individual bars representing the number of publications in specific fields. When viewed from a distance, the poster reveals a sun rising out of the mountains, which is created with a line graph charting the number of UVA publications over the last decade. A breakdown in the top right corner highlights the university's top five fields by publication, with Molecular Biology and Surgery taking the lead.
In the second poster, various sunbursts were curated to paint a creative picture of just how different research can look across universities. When viewed from afar, each of the visualizations merges into the shape of an eclipse – a rare, momentary alignment. The poster aims to capture this very concept, in which each sunburst contains a “snapshot” of a university's publications and areas of focus at one moment in time.
Anna Yao
Anna Yao grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and moved to Charlottesville to join UVA’s B.S. in Data Science in the first cohort set to graduate in 2027. She majors in data science with a minor in computer science, spending her time outside of
academics painting, playing guitar, cooking, and being outdoors as long as she can. After graduating, she hopes to continue practicing her technical skills as a UX designer.
Anna spends much of her time building interactive web-based visualizations. Most notably, she developed a dashboard mapping 44,000+ points of UVA research data with insights into PIs, research grants, and different fields of study, a project created under the mentorship of Professor Alex Gates. During the school year, she works as an Interactive Design Assistant for the Connected Data Hub led by Alex Gates, assistant professor of data science, and as an Instructional Assistant for DS 1001 "Foundations of Data." With her research experience, she landed a UX Design internship the summer following her third year at Strategy, where she designed AI tuning products for the company.
Since her research with Gates began the summer of her second year, Anna has built her portfolio in designing dashboards with D3.js, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript. She entered the Data Is Art Competition as her first-ever competition in this field, with entries that extend her current work visualizing publication data at UVA.
Anna’s passion for data design stems from communication. By translating abstract data into intuitive visual narratives, she hopes to make her work accessible for anyone to explore and understand. She is currently finishing her fourth year at UVA, continuing her studies in data and design through academics and research.
View Anna's portfolio: https://annayao0602.github.io/dataportfolio
