visualization fragments
Collected, classified, and made explorable in the open Vis-Sieve demonstration.
Researcher, designer, and engineer
Visual systems for complex questions.
I build interactive tools that help researchers and the public examine large, messy, or contested bodies of evidence.
My work connects visual analytics, research software engineering, interpretable AI, and digital humanities.
A few concrete outcomes
What the work had to handle.
browser payload
A 98.6% reduction using DuckDB and Parquet, while keeping exploration client-side.
dimensions and features
A theory-guided persuasion framework whose individual measurements remain inspectable.
About
I move between research questions, visual design, and production systems.
I am a data visualization researcher and software engineer based in Huntsville, Alabama. I earned an M.P.S. from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and recently led development for NYU's Colonial Networks while contributing to interdisciplinary research in visual analytics and interpretable AI.
I currently work in engineering operations for high-volume automated manufacturing and continue building research software across visualization, digital humanities, and language technologies.
Open to data visualization, research software, creative technology, and PhD opportunities in HCI, visual analytics, and human-centered AI.
01 / Selected work
Research questions, made explorable.
Projects that connect rigorous data work with clear, responsive interfaces.
35,000 fragments2D + 3D exploration
Vis-Sieve
An end-to-end multimodal pipeline and interface for classifying and exploring large collections of scholarly figures.
- Linked 2D and 3D views built with D3, Observable, Three.js, and WebGL
- An end-to-end workflow from figure extraction and multimodal classification to visual exploration
- Automated labels evaluated against human judgments and published as first-authored research
Illustration above. Open the demo to see the working interface.
OBJECT1775Paris
OWNERRecord 08contested
PLACESaint-Dominguelinked source
Provenance Stories
Nine interactive art-history narratives connecting artworks, ownership, place, colonial wealth, and contested evidence through linked text, timelines, maps, and networks.
My role: Lead developer and research technologist, from data model and ETL to interface design and production deployment.
Illustration above. Open the stories to see the live narrative interface.
Radar overview15 dimensions · mean only
Persuasion Index
A theory-guided framework that makes persuasive language measurable without collapsing analysis into one opaque model judgment.
My role: Lead computational developer and co-author, building evaluation pipelines, the web interface, REST API, CLI, and Python package.
Illustration above. Open the interface to explore the working analysis system.
PARIS / 177513 linked lives
Slaves in Paris
A public-facing StoryMap that traces 13 enslaved people through eighteenth-century Paris and reconnects archival biographies to a georeferenced 1775 city map.
My role: Geospatial story designer and developer, integrating archival research, narrative sequencing, custom web work, and deployment.
Illustration above. Open the project to see the published StoryMap.
ROOM / 03Spatial voice
Spatial Talk
A browser-based 3D meeting environment that uses spatial navigation and peer-to-peer voice to explore how virtual rooms can shape conversation.
My role: Independent designer and developer across concept, interaction design, 3D front end, real-time communication, and deployment.
Illustration above. Open the project to enter the working 3D environment.
02 / Research
Systems that support interpretation.
I work from research question to operational definition, data pipeline, interface, and evaluation.
Research position
Patterns matter, but so do the assumptions and source evidence that produce them.
My research treats visualization as part of the analytical method. Interfaces should make aggregation useful without hiding uncertainty, provenance, or the path back to individual cases.
Peer-reviewed publications
2026Accepted · Main Conference
Persuasion Index: A Theory-Guided Framework for Persuasion Analysis
Liancheng Gong, Zhiyang Wang, Yiwei Xu, Julia Mendelsohn
EMNLP 2026
2025First author
Multi-Modal LLM Assisted Visualization of Large Visualization Collections
Zhiyang Wang, Devin Bayly, Carolina Roe-Raymond
PEARC ’25 · ACM
03 / Contact