Bold claim: PeaceRep is redefining how data can illuminate peace, conflict, and mediation through visualisation—and this is exactly what happened at IEEE VIS 2025 in Vienna. All three PeaceRep submissions were accepted, including a poster, a dedicated workshop on visualising peace and conflict, and an award-winning research paper. This trio of contributions underscores PeaceRep’s expanding impact in advancing data visualisation methods that support peace mediation, conflict analysis, and public understanding.
Explore PeaceRep’s suite of data visualisation and PeaceTech tools → (https://peacerep.org/peacetech-tools/)
PeaceRep made a strong showing at IEEE VIS 2025, the premier international conference for scientific visualisation, data visualisation, and visual analytics. Hosted by IEEE, the event gathers leading researchers from around the world. This year’s acceptance of all PeaceRep submissions highlights the consortium’s growing leadership at the intersection of peace, conflict, and data visualization.
PeaceRep’s accepted works included:
- A poster with a short paper that presents PeaceTech visualisation research
- A dedicated workshop focused on visualising peace and conflict resolution
- A full research paper co-authored by PeaceRep visualisation researchers, which earned a Best Paper Honorable Mention
Poster Exhibition: Visualising Peace and Conflict
[Download the poster (https://peacerep.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Vis-Poster.pdf) and the accompanying paper (https://peacerep.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Vis-Peace-Poster-accompanying-paper.pdf) ]
The poster was created collaboratively by current and former PeaceTech researchers at PeaceRep (Tomas Vancisin, Jinrui Wang, Niamh Henry, Sarah Schöttler, Lucy Havens, Tobias Kauer, Sanja Badanjak, Christine Bell, and Benjamin Bach). It showcased PeaceRep’s three core approaches to using visualisation technology to support peace mediation:
- Analysis
- Communication
- Tracking
Featuring nine visualisations, the poster signaled an emerging research area that blends peace and conflict resolution with data visualisation to address humanitarian and societal challenges from new angles. The exhibition drew notable attention across the conference, with attendees curious about how peace and conflict can be represented visually and what kinds of data enable such representations. Many were impressed by PeaceRep’s PeaceTech visualisations and connected them to their own experiences, recognizing their potential to engage broader public audiences.
Workshop: Bringing Peace and Conflict to VIS4DH
Two of the conference’s seven days are dedicated to workshops, including the long-running Visualisation for Digital Humanities (VIS4DH) workshop, now in its ninth year. VIS4DH centers on the intersection of the humanities and visualisation and how combining approaches from both fields can advance research.
This year, PeaceRep Research Associate Tomas Vancisin served as a co-organiser of VIS4DH and championed Peace and Conflict as the main theme, giving this relatively new research area unprecedented visibility within the global visualisation community.
The VIS4DH team invited Jan Pospisil (Coventry University) as a keynote speaker in recognition of his expertise and direct experience gathering data in conflict settings through PeaceRep’s Perceptions of Peace in South Sudan surveys. The keynote attracted a diverse audience from the VIS and Digital Humanities communities, offering rare insights into data collection and analysis in complex conflict environments.
Award-Winning Paper: Transparency Through Visualisation Badges
PeaceRep researchers also contributed to the paper The Visualization Badges: Communicating Design and Provenance through Graphical Labels Alongside Visualizations, authored by Valentin Edelsbrunner, Jinrui Wang (PeaceRep), Alexis Pister, Tomas Vancisin (PeaceRep), Sian Phillips, Min Chen, and Benjamin Bach (PeaceRep).
The paper introduces a novel approach to making data visualisations clearer and more honest: graphical badges. These badges act as small visual cues placed beside a chart to convey essential context. They can flag a major finding, indicate when an axis has been truncated, or warn readers about potential visual artefacts. In doing so, they help visualisation creators explain their analytical and design choices, while helping readers interpret what they see more accurately.
The badge framework emerged from a series of co-design workshops involving PeaceRep researchers, shaping both the concept and its practical use. PeaceRep’s Messy Timeline visualisation was highlighted as an example for discussion, with researchers offering critical assessments of open data principles and uncertainty communication. This example became a key case study for the visualisation badges and is featured on the badge website (https://vis-badges.github.io/#/examples).
Outcomes included:
- A catalogue of 132 visualisation badges with different design options
- Multiple categorisation schemes
- Real-world visualisation examples
- Clear guidelines for implementation
The work earned a Best Paper Honorable Mention, placing it among the top 5% of submissions at IEEE VIS 2025.
Citations
Edelsbrunner, V., Wang, J., Pister, A., Vancisin, T., Phillips, S., Chen, M., & Bach, B. (2026). Visualization Badges: Communicating Design and Provenance through Graphical Labels Alongside Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
Explore PeaceRep’s suite of data visualisation and PeaceTech tools → (https://peacerep.org/peacetech-tools/)
