Since the beginning of her academic career she has believed that visual methods are powerful tools for research and she has taken steps to introduce them into the field of information science. Dr. Hartel has won the Association for Library and Information Science methodology award for a paper on photographic methods; published the first methodological paper on visual methods in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Hartel & Thomson, 2011); hosted and presented on many panels about visual methods at international conferences; and taught classes on visual methods at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Dr. Hartel is the creator of iSquare Research Program and leader of the iSquare Research Team. She has spear-headed the collection of more than 2,000 drawings of information from twelve countries and numerous academic disciplines.