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A Visual Backchannel for Large-Scale Events
"... Abstract—We introduce the concept of a Visual Backchannel as a novel way of following and exploring online conversations about large-scale events. Microblogging communities, such as Twitter, are increasingly used as digital backchannels for timely exchange of brief comments and impressions during po ..."
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Abstract—We introduce the concept of a Visual Backchannel as a novel way of following and exploring online conversations about large-scale events. Microblogging communities, such as Twitter, are increasingly used as digital backchannels for timely exchange of brief comments and impressions during political speeches, sport competitions, natural disasters, and other large events. Currently, shared updates are typically displayed in the form of a simple list, making it difficult to get an overview of the fast-paced discussions as it happens in the moment and how it evolves over time. In contrast, our Visual Backchannel design provides an evolving, interactive, and multi-faceted visual overview of large-scale ongoing conversations on Twitter. To visualize a continuously updating information stream, we include visual saliency for what is happening now and what has just happened, set in the context of the evolving conversation. As part of a fully web-based coordinated-view system we introduce Topic Streams, a temporally adjustable stacked graph visualizing topics over time, a People Spiral representing participants and their activity, and an Image Cloud encoding the popularity of event photos by size. Together with a post listing, these mutually linked views support cross-filtering along topics, participants, and time ranges. We discuss our design considerations, in particular with respect to evolving visualizations of dynamically changing data. Initial feedback indicates significant interest and suggests several unanticipated uses.
Understanding and Characterizing Insights: How Do People Gain Insights Using Information Visualization?
"... Even though “providing insight ” has been considered one of the main purposes of information visualization (InfoVis), we feel that insight is still a not-well-understood concept in this context. Inspired by research in sensemaking, we realized the importance of the procedural aspects in understandin ..."
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Cited by 29 (1 self)
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Even though “providing insight ” has been considered one of the main purposes of information visualization (InfoVis), we feel that insight is still a not-well-understood concept in this context. Inspired by research in sensemaking, we realized the importance of the procedural aspects in understanding insight. Thus, rather than asking “What is insight? ” we instead focus on “How do people gain insights? ” In an effort to better understand and characterize insight, we reviewed previous literature in InfoVis, seeking other researchers ’ comments and views on this concept. We found that: 1) Insights are often regarded as end results of using InfoVis and the procedures to gain insight have been largely veiled; 2) Four largely distinctive processes of gaining insight (Provide Overview, Adjust, Detect Pattern, and Match Mental Model) have been discussed in the InfoVis literature; and 3) These different processes provide some hints to understand the procedures in which insight can be gained from InfoVis. We hope that our findings help researchers and practitioners evaluate InfoVis systems and technologies in a more insight-oriented way. Categories and Subject Descriptors
How Information Visualization Novices Construct Visualizations
, 2010
"... It remains challenging for information visualization novices to rapidly construct visualizations during exploratory data analysis. We conducted an exploratory laboratory study in which information visualization novices explored fictitious sales data by communicating visualization specifications to a ..."
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Cited by 27 (4 self)
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It remains challenging for information visualization novices to rapidly construct visualizations during exploratory data analysis. We conducted an exploratory laboratory study in which information visualization novices explored fictitious sales data by communicating visualization specifications to a human mediator, who rapidly constructed the visualizations using commercial visualization software. We found that three activities were central to the iterative visualization construction process: data attribute selection, visual template selection, and visual mapping specification. The major barriers faced by the participants were translating questions into data attributes, designing visual mappings, and interpreting the visualizations. Partial specification was common, and the participants used simple heuristics and preferred visualizations they were already familiar with, such as bar, line and pie charts. From our observations, we derived abstract models that describe barriers in the data exploration process and uncovered how information visualization novices think about visualization specifications. Our findings support the need for tools that suggest potential visualizations and support iterative refinement, that provide explanations and help with learning, and that are tightly integrated into tool support for the overall visual analytics process.
ManiWordle: Providing Flexible Control over Wordle
"... Fig. 1. ManiWordle showing a word cloud for the titles and abstracts of all InfoVis papers published since 1995. A word “data ” is being rotated. Abstract—Among the multifarious tag-clouding techniques, Wordle stands out to the community by providing an aesthetic layout, eliciting the emergence of t ..."
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Cited by 25 (0 self)
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Fig. 1. ManiWordle showing a word cloud for the titles and abstracts of all InfoVis papers published since 1995. A word “data ” is being rotated. Abstract—Among the multifarious tag-clouding techniques, Wordle stands out to the community by providing an aesthetic layout, eliciting the emergence of the participatory culture and usage of tag-clouding in the artistic creations [23]. In this paper, we introduce ManiWordle, a Wordle-based visualization tool that revamps interactions with the layout by supporting custom manipulations. ManiWordle allows people to manipulate typography, color, and composition not only for the layout as a whole, but also for the individual words, enabling them to have better control over the layout result. We first describe our design rationale along with the interaction techniques for tweaking the layout. We then present the results both from the preliminary usability study and from the comparative study between ManiWordle and Wordle. The results suggest that ManiWordle provides higher user satisfaction and an efficient method of creating the desired "art work, " harnessing the power behind the ever-increasing popularity of Wordle. Index Terms—Interaction design, direct manipulation, flexibilty-usability tradeoff, tag-cloud, participatory visualization, user study. 1
The Value of Information Visualization
"... Abstract. Researchers and users of Information Visualization are convinced that it has value. This value can easily be communicated to others in a face-to-face setting, such that this value is experienced in practice. To convince broader audiences, and also, to understand the intrinsic qualities of ..."
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Cited by 25 (4 self)
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Abstract. Researchers and users of Information Visualization are convinced that it has value. This value can easily be communicated to others in a face-to-face setting, such that this value is experienced in practice. To convince broader audiences, and also, to understand the intrinsic qualities of visualization is more difficult, however. In this paper we consider information visualization from different points of view, and gather arguments to explain the value of our field. 1 Problems and Challenges This paper provides a discussion of issues surrounding the value of Information Visualization (InfoVis). The very existence of the paper should alert the reader that challenges do exist in both recognizing and communicating the field’s value. After all, if the value would be clear and undisputed, there would be no need to write the paper! Unfortunately, the current situation is far from that. By its very focus and purpose, InfoVis is a discipline that makes the recognition of value extremely difficult, a point that will be expanded below. Why is showing value important? Well, today’s research environment places great importance on evaluation involving quantifiable metrics that can be assessed and judged with clarity and accuracy. Organizations sponsoring research and corporations that serve to benefit from it want to know that the monetary investments they make are being well-spent. Researchers are being challenged
WikipediaViz: Conveying Article Quality for Casual Wikipedia Readers
- PACIFICVIS '10: IEEE PACIFIC VISUALIZATION SYMPOSIUM (2010) 215-222
, 2010
"... As Wikipedia has become one of the most used knowledge bases worldwide, the problem of the trustworthiness of the information it disseminates becomes central. With WikipediaViz, we introduce five visual indicators integrated to the Wikipedia layout that can keep casual Wikipedia readers aware of imp ..."
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Cited by 20 (7 self)
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As Wikipedia has become one of the most used knowledge bases worldwide, the problem of the trustworthiness of the information it disseminates becomes central. With WikipediaViz, we introduce five visual indicators integrated to the Wikipedia layout that can keep casual Wikipedia readers aware of important metainformation about the articles they read. The design of WikipediaViz was inspired by two participatory design sessions with expert Wikipedia writers and sociologists who explained the clues they used to quickly assess the trustworthiness of articles. According to these results, we propose five metrics for Maturity and Quality assessment of Wikipedia articles and their accompanying visualizations to provide the readers with important clues about the editing process at a glance. We also report and discuss about the results of the user studies we conducted. Two preliminary pilot studies show that all our subjects trust Wikipedia articles almost blindly. With the third study, we show that WikipediaViz significantly reduces the time required to assess the quality of articles while maintaining a good accuracy.
Collaborative Visualization: Definition, Challenges, and Research Agenda
"... The conflux of two growing areas of technology— collaboration and visualization—into a new research direction, collaborative visualization, provides new research challenges. Technology now allows us to easily connect and collaborate with one another—in settings as diverse as over networked computers ..."
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Cited by 19 (3 self)
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The conflux of two growing areas of technology— collaboration and visualization—into a new research direction, collaborative visualization, provides new research challenges. Technology now allows us to easily connect and collaborate with one another—in settings as diverse as over networked computers, across mobile devices, or using shared displays such as interactive walls and tabletop surfaces. Digital information is now regularly accessed by multiple people in order to share information, to view it together, to analyze it, or to form decisions. Visualizations are used to deal more effectively with large amounts of information while interactive visualizations allow users to explore the underlying data. While researchers face many challenges in collaboration and in visualization, the emergence of collaborative visualization poses additional challenges but is also an exciting opportunity to reach new audiences and applications for visualization tools and techniques. The purpose of this article is (1) to provide a definition, clear scope, and overview of the evolving field of collaborative visualization, (2) to help pinpoint the unique focus of collaborative visualization with its specific aspects, challenges, and requirements within the intersection of general computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and visualization research, and (3) to draw attention to important future research questions to be addressed by the community. We conclude by discussing a research agenda for future work on collaborative visualization and urge for a new generation of visualization tools that are designed with collaboration in mind from their very inception.
Beyond the tyranny of the pixel: Exploring the physicality of information visualization
- In Information Visualisation
, 2008
"... This paper consists of a review of contemporary methods that map and materialize abstract data as physical artifacts. With computing technology and the access of information influencing every aspect of our everyday lives, one can question the current habit of information displays to ‘simulate ’ real ..."
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Cited by 18 (0 self)
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This paper consists of a review of contemporary methods that map and materialize abstract data as physical artifacts. With computing technology and the access of information influencing every aspect of our everyday lives, one can question the current habit of information displays to ‘simulate ’ real world metaphors, and whether information could instead be conveyed by approximating the analogue and tangible characteristics of our daily experiences. This paper introduces five different degrees of ‘data physicality’, which differ in the level of abstraction of how data is mapped and perceived by human senses: ambient display, pixel sculptures, object augmentation, data sculptures and alternative modality. This categorization demonstrates the potential of information visualization as a communication medium in its own right, which proliferates beyond the ubiquitous pixel-based, light-emitting surfaces of today.
The information flaneur: A fresh look at information seeking
- In CHI ’11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM
, 2011
"... We introduce the information flaneur as a new human-centred view on information seeking that is grounded in interdisciplinary research. We use the metaphor of the urban flaneur making sense of a city as an inspiring lens that brings together diverse perspectives. These perspectives shift information ..."
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Cited by 17 (9 self)
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We introduce the information flaneur as a new human-centred view on information seeking that is grounded in interdisciplinary research. We use the metaphor of the urban flaneur making sense of a city as an inspiring lens that brings together diverse perspectives. These perspectives shift information seeking towards a more optimistic outlook: the information flaneur represents curious, creative, and critical information seeking. The resulting information-seeking model conceptualizes the interrelated nature between information activities and experiences as a continuum between horizontal exploration and vertical immersion. Motivated by enabling technological trends and inspired by the information flaneur, we present explorability as a new guiding principle for design and raise research challenges regarding the representation of information abstractions and details.
A multi-level typology of abstract visualization tasks
- IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. InfoVis
"... Accepted for publication by IEEE. ©2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/ ..."
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Cited by 17 (2 self)
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Accepted for publication by IEEE. ©2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/
