Segue: Overviewing Evolution Patterns of Egocentric Networks by Interactive Construction of Spatial Layouts

Getting the overall picture of how a large number of ego-networks evolve is a common yet challenging task. Existing techniques often require analysts to inspect the evolution patterns of ego-networks one after another. In this study, we explore an approach that allows analysts to interactively create spatial layouts in which each dot is a dynamic ego-network. These spatial layouts provide overviews of the evolution patterns of ego-networks, thereby revealing different global patterns such as trends, clusters and outliers in evolution patterns. To let analysts interactively construct interpretable spatial layouts, we propose a data transformation pipeline, with which analysts can adjust the spatial layouts and convert dynamic egonetworks into event sequences to aid interpretations of the spatial positions. Based on this transformation pipeline, we developed Segue, a visual analysis system that supports thorough exploration of the evolution patterns of ego-networks. Through two usage scenarios, we demonstrate how analysts can gain insights into the overall evolution patterns of a large collection of ego-networks by interactively creating different spatial layouts.Comment: Published at IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (IEEE VAST 2018

The afterlife of 'living deliverables': angels or zombies?

Within the STELLAR project, we provide the possibility to use living documents for the collaborative writing work on deliverables. Compared to 'normal' deliverables, 'living' deliverables come into existence much earlier than their delivery deadline and are expected to 'live on' after their official delivery to the European Commission. They are expected to foster collaboration. Within this contribution we investigate, how these deliverables have been used over the first 16 months of the project. We therefore propose a set of new analysis methods facilitating social network analysis on publicly available revision history data. With this instrumentarium, we critically look at whether the living deliverables have been successfully used for collaboration and whether their 'afterlife' beyond the contractual deadline had turned them into 'zombies' (still visible, but no or little live editing activities). The results show that the observed deliverables show signs of life, but often in connection with a topical change and in conjunction with changes in the pattern of collaboration

Teaching information visualization by exploring their power in engaging users of social media applications

The paper describes a novel way of introducing methods and approaches of visualizing data to undergraduate students that was conducted during a seven-week module course at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University, Shanghai, China. It starts with a brief introduction to the rational and methodology used, followed by an examination of the four pedagogical phases that structured the course, including sample of student work. A discussion provides a critical view of the pros and cons of this pedagogical approach with directions for future curriculu

Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

How Visualization Supports the Daily Work in Traditional Humanities on the Example of Visual Analysis Case Studies

Attempts to convince humanities scholars of digital approaches are met with resistance, often. The so-called Digitization Anxiety is the phenomenon that describes the fear of many traditional scientists of being replaced by digital processes. This hinders not only the progress of the scientific domains themselves – since a lot of digital potential is missing – but also makes the everyday work of researchers unnecessarily difficult. Over the past eight years, we have made various attempts to walk the tightrope between 'How can we help traditional humanities to exploit their digital potential?' and 'How can we make them understand that their expertise is not replaced by digital means, but complemented?' We will present our successful interdisciplinary collaborations: How they came about, how they developed, and the problems we encountered. In the first step, we will look at the theoretical basics, which paint a comprehensive picture of the digital humanities and introduces us to the topic of visualization. The field of visualization has shown a special ability: It manages to walk the tightrope and thus keeps digitization anxiety at bay, while not only making it easier for scholars to access their data, but also enabling entirely new research questions. After an introduction to our interdisciplinary collaborations with the Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University, as well as with the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, we will present a series of user scenarios that we have collected in the course of 13 publications. These show our cooperation partners solving different research tasks, which we classify using Brehmer and Munzner’s Task Classification. In this way, we show that we provide researchers with a wide range of opportunities: They can answer their traditional research questions – and in some cases verify long-standing hypotheses about the data for the first time – but also develop their own interest in previously impossible, new research questions and approaches. Finally, we conclude our insights on individual collaborative ideas with perspectives on our newest projects. These have risen from the growing interest of collaborators in the methods we deliver. For example, we get insights into the music of real virtuosos of the 20th century. The necessary music storage media can be heard for the first time through digital tools without risking damage to the old material. In addition, we can provide computer-aided analysis capabilities that help musicologists in their work. In the course of the visualization project at the Bergen-Belsen memorial, we will see that what was once a small diary project has grown into a multimodal and international project with institutions of culture and science from eight countries. This is dedicated not only to the question of preserving cultural objects from Nazi persecution contexts but also to modern ways of disseminating and processing knowledge around this context. Finally, we will compile our experience and accumulated knowledge in the form of problems and challenges at the border between computer science and traditional humanities. These will serve as preparation and assistance for future and current interested parties of such interdisciplinary collaborative project

The Medieval Dublin Project: A Case Study

[ES] This paper provides an overview of the Medieval Dublin Project. It covers the development and release of the DVD ‘Medieval Dublin: From Vikings to Tudors (Schools Edition),’ and outlines the major virtual and interactive features developed for that release. The paper also covers the collaboration that took place between the DVD development team and the academic community and discusses the ways in which 3D visualisations, timelines, interactivity and character-based storytelling were used to present Dublin’s archaeological heritage in an engaging and interesting wayO'hoisin, N.; O'malley, B. (2010). The Medieval Dublin Project: A Case Study. Virtual Archaeology Review. 1(1):45-49. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2010.4766OJS454911Medieval Dublin: From Vikings to Tudors (Schools Edition) (2007)CLARKE, H.B. Dublin c. 840 to c. 1540: the Medieval Town in the Modern City (1978; 2nd edn, 2002) [Ordnance Survey map

Placing Birds On A Dynamic Evolutionary Map: Using Digital Tools To Update The Evolutionary Metaphor Of The Tree Of Life

This dissertation describes and presents a new type of interactive visualization for communicating about evolutionary biology, the dynamic evolutionary map. This web-based tool utilizes a novel map-based metaphor to visualize evolution, rather than the traditional tree of life. The dissertation begins with an analysis of the conceptual affordances of the traditional tree of life as the dominant metaphor for evolution. Next, theories from digital media, visualization, and cognitive science research are synthesized to support the assertion that digital media tools can extend the types of visual metaphors we use in science communication in order to overcome conceptual limitations of traditional metaphors. These theories are then applied to a specific problem of science communication, resulting in the dynamic evolutionary map. Metaphor is a crucial part of scientific communication, and metaphor-based scientific visualizations, models, and analogies play a profound role in shaping our ideas about the world around us. Users of the dynamic evolutionary map interact with evolution in two ways: by observing the diversification of bird orders over time and by examining the evidence for avian evolution at several places in evolutionary history. By combining these two types of interaction with a non-traditional map metaphor, evolution is framed in a novel way that supplements traditional metaphors for communicating about evolution. This reframing in turn suggests new conceptual affordances to users who are learning about evolution. Empirical testing of the dynamic evolutionary map by biology novices suggests that this approach is successful in communicating evolution differently than in existing tree-based visualization methods. Results of evaluation of the map by biology experts suggest possibilities for future enhancement and testing of this visualization that would help refine these successes. This dissertation represents an important step forward in the synthesis of scientific, design, and metaphor theory, as applied to a specific problem of science communication. The dynamic evolutionary map demonstrates that these theories can be used to guide the construction of a visualization for communicating a scientific concept in a way that is both novel and grounded in theory. There are several potential applications in the fields of informal science education, formal education, and evolutionary biology for the visualization created in this dissertation. Moreover, the approach suggested in this dissertation can potentially be extended into other areas of science and science communication. By placing birds onto the dynamic evolutionary map, this dissertation points to a way forward for visualizing science communication in the futur

A Survey on ML4VIS: Applying Machine Learning Advances to Data Visualization

Inspired by the great success of machine learning (ML), researchers have applied ML techniques to visualizations to achieve a better design, development, and evaluation of visualizations. This branch of studies, known as ML4VIS, is gaining increasing research attention in recent years. To successfully adapt ML techniques for visualizations, a structured understanding of the integration of ML4VISis needed. In this paper, we systematically survey 88 ML4VIS studies, aiming to answer two motivating questions: "what visualization processes can be assisted by ML?" and "how ML techniques can be used to solve visualization problems?" This survey reveals seven main processes where the employment of ML techniques can benefit visualizations:Data Processing4VIS, Data-VIS Mapping, InsightCommunication, Style Imitation, VIS Interaction, VIS Reading, and User Profiling. The seven processes are related to existing visualization theoretical models in an ML4VIS pipeline, aiming to illuminate the role of ML-assisted visualization in general visualizations.Meanwhile, the seven processes are mapped into main learning tasks in ML to align the capabilities of ML with the needs in visualization. Current practices and future opportunities of ML4VIS are discussed in the context of the ML4VIS pipeline and the ML-VIS mapping. While more studies are still needed in the area of ML4VIS, we hope this paper can provide a stepping-stone for future exploration. A web-based interactive browser of this survey is available at https://ml4vis.github.ioComment: 19 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Gnovis: Flowing Through the Galaxy of Knowledge

Gnovis is a novel application for all scholars and teachers in the humanities that will, in the long run, permit the re-conceptualization of data that have until recently been presented in rigid, non-individualized formats. Gnovis is a first attempt at producing an engine that can display corpora of knowledge in multi-dimensional environments, allowing for the visualization of extensive amounts of material organized semantically in nested clusters. We plan to implement a prototype visual interface for a compact but detailed set of knowledge in the humanities. Our goal is to explore different visualization styles and interfaces. We are interested in creating a more fluid style of interface than the current web-page paradigm where a click can take you to a new page, more smoothly navigable even than the Google maps style which allows the user to drag information from out of the current view

Exploratory Browsing

In recent years the digital media has influenced many areas of our life. The transition from analogue to digital has substantially changed our ways of dealing with media collections. Today‟s interfaces for managing digital media mainly offer fixed linear models corresponding to the underlying technical concepts (folders, events, albums, etc.), or the metaphors borrowed from the analogue counterparts (e.g., stacks, film rolls). However, people‟s mental interpretations of their media collections often go beyond the scope of linear scan. Besides explicit search with specific goals, current interfaces can not sufficiently support the explorative and often non-linear behavior. This dissertation presents an exploration of interface design to enhance the browsing experience with media collections. The main outcome of this thesis is a new model of Exploratory Browsing to guide the design of interfaces to support the full range of browsing activities, especially the Exploratory Browsing. We define Exploratory Browsing as the behavior when the user is uncertain about her or his targets and needs to discover areas of interest (exploratory), in which she or he can explore in detail and possibly find some acceptable items (browsing). According to the browsing objectives, we group browsing activities into three categories: Search Browsing, General Purpose Browsing and Serendipitous Browsing. In the context of this thesis, Exploratory Browsing refers to the latter two browsing activities, which goes beyond explicit search with specific objectives. We systematically explore the design space of interfaces to support the Exploratory Browsing experience. Applying the methodology of User-Centered Design, we develop eight prototypes, covering two main usage contexts of browsing with personal collections and in online communities. The main studied media types are photographs and music. The main contribution of this thesis lies in deepening the understanding of how people‟s exploratory behavior has an impact on the interface design. This thesis contributes to the field of interface design for media collections in several aspects. With the goal to inform the interface design to support the Exploratory Browsing experience with media collections, we present a model of Exploratory Browsing, covering the full range of exploratory activities around media collections. We investigate this model in different usage contexts and develop eight prototypes. The substantial implications gathered during the development and evaluation of these prototypes inform the further refinement of our model: We uncover the underlying transitional relations between browsing activities and discover several stimulators to encourage a fluid and effective activity transition. Based on this model, we propose a catalogue of general interface characteristics, and employ this catalogue as criteria to analyze the effectiveness of our prototypes. We also present several general suggestions for designing interfaces for media collections