  In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers
to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we
growing as a field, what are we building towards, and are our existing methods
sufficient to get us there? My respondents discussed several potential
challenges for visualization research in terms of knowledge formation: a lack
of rigor in the methods used, a lack of applicability to actual communities of
practice, and a lack of theoretical structures that incorporate everything that
happens to people and to data both before and after the few seconds when a
viewer looks at a value in a chart. Orienting the field around progress (if
such a thing is even desirable, which is another point of contention) I believe
will require drastic re-conceptions of what the field is, what it values, and
how it is taught.
