As I get closer to my comprehensive exams, I’ve been trying to answer a deceptively simple question: what is my PhD actually about? I can describe individual projects, but I also need to explain how they fit together and what I want to do next. Over the past few months, two parts of my work have been helping me think through that question: a collaboration with domain experts in France, and a scoping review.

My starting point has been haptics for data representation in analytical contexts. In my work on vibrotactile line charts, I looked at what touch could add to a familiar visual interaction pattern - details on demand. The France project pushes that question into a much more complex and urgent setting: supporting situational awareness in the control room of a wastewater-treatment plant. There, data is tied to physical processes - most of which are only monitored indirectly through readings from machinery - and to the decisions people make based on the state of these processes. It made me think more carefully about when information should draw attention, when it can stay in the background, and what touch, a resource that can quickly become annoying if overused, can contribute alongside the displays people already use. More on this to come soon.

At the same time, I worked on a scoping review to get a clearer picture of the research around multisensory data representation. I wanted to see what kinds of data and tasks researchers have studied, how they have used touch alongside other senses, and how they have evaluated those designs. I was also interested in where the work has taken place: in abstract charts, in tools for exploration, or in settings where people have to act on what the data tells them.

Across the 63 full papers we reviewed, only two papers represented data through touch and hearing without vision. The more useful finding for my own work, though, is that a sense doesn’t have one fixed job. Touch might help someone find a data point, convey its value, or keep their place while sound provides detail. These roles can change as a person moves through a task. That means a multisensory design has to preserve context when someone moves between senses, and its evaluation has to test whether people can make the intended inference from the full sequence.

The review was also a way to step back from my own projects. It helps me see which questions have been explored repeatedly and where my work can make a useful contribution. I still need to decide which of those questions matters most for my PhD.

For my comprehensive exams, I hope to bring these two views together. The situational awareness project gives me a concrete setting in which to test my ideas. The scoping review helps me place those ideas within the wider field. And leading up to my comprehensive exams, I’m trying to piece together a roadmap to a theoretical framework of how different multisensory representations of complex, dynamic data can support analytical tasks. Our brain perceives the world in an inherently multisensory manner and relies on this ability to reason about reality; can our experience of data be similarly enriched beyond the typical visual channels?