DevLan/vispubs huggingface dataset:
Visual Analytics for Understanding Draco's Knowledge Base
Authors: Johanna Schmidt, Bernhard Pointner, Silvia Miksch
Published at Vis, 2023

Draco has been developed as an automated visualization recommendation system formalizing design knowledge as logical constraints in ASP (Answer-Set Programming). With an increasing set of constraints and incorporated design knowledge, even visualization experts lose overview in Draco and struggle to retrace the automated recommendation decisions made by the system. Our paper proposes an Visual Analytics (VA) approach to visualize and analyze Draco's constraints. Our VA approach is supposed to enable visualization experts to accomplish identified tasks regarding the knowledge base and support them in better understanding Draco. We extend the existing data extraction strategy of Draco with a data processing architecture capable of extracting features of interest from the knowledge base. A revised version of the ASP grammar provides the basis for this data processing strategy. The resulting incorporated and shared features of the constraints are then visualized using a hypergraph structure inside the radial-arranged constraints of the elaborated visualization. The hierarchical categories of the constraints are indicated by arcs surrounding the constraints. Our approach is supposed to enable visualization experts to interactively explore the design rules' violations based on highlighting respective constraints or recommendations. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the prototype confirms the prototype's effectiveness and value in acquiring insights into Draco's recommendation process and design constraints.
Visualization According to Statisticians: An Interview Study on the Role of Visualization for Inferential Statistics
Authors: Eric Newburger, Niklas Elmqvist
Published at Vis, 2023

Statisticians are not only one of the earliest professional adopters of data visualization, but also some of its most prolific users. Understanding how these professionals utilize visual representations in their analytic process may shed light on best practices for visual sensemaking. We present results from an interview study involving 18 professional statisticians (19.7 years average in the profession) on three aspects: (1) their use of visualization in their daily analytic work; (2) their mental models of inferential statistical processes; and (3) their design recommendations for how to best represent statistical inferences. Interview sessions consisted of discussing inferential statistics, eliciting participant sketches of suitable visual designs, and finally, a design intervention with our proposed visual designs. We analyzed interview transcripts using thematic analysis and open coding, deriving thematic codes on statistical mindset, analytic process, and analytic toolkit. The key findings for each aspect are as follows: (1) statisticians make extensive use of visualization during all phases of their work (and not just when reporting results); (2) their mental models of inferential methods tend to be mostly visually based; and (3) many statisticians abhor dichotomous thinking. The latter suggests that a multi-faceted visual display of inferential statistics that includes a visual indicator of analytically important effect sizes may help to balance the attributed epistemic power of traditional statistical testing with an awareness of the uncertainty of sensemaking.
Visualization of Discontinuous Vector Field Topology
Authors: Egzon Miftari, Daniel Durstewitz, Filip Sadlo
Published at Vis, 2023

This paper extends the concept and the visualization of vector field topology to vector fields with discontinuities. We address the non-uniqueness of flow in such fields by introduction of a time-reversible concept of equivalence. This concept generalizes streamlines to streamsets and thus vector field topology to discontinuous vector fields in terms of invariant streamsets. We identify respective novel critical structures as well as their manifolds, investigate their interplay with traditional vector field topology, and detail the application and interpretation of our approach using specifically designed synthetic cases and a simulated case from physics.
Visualizing Historical Book Trade Data: An Iterative Design Study with Close Collaboration with Domain Experts
Authors: Yiwen Xing, Cristina Dondi, Rita Borgo, Alfie Abdul-Rahman
Published at Vis, 2023

The circulation of historical books has always been an area of interest for historians. However, the data used to represent the journey of a book across different places and times can be difficult for domain experts to digest due to buried geographical and chronological features within text-based presentations. This situation provides an opportunity for collaboration between visualization researchers and historians. This paper describes a design study where a variant of the Nine-Stage Framework [46] was employed to develop a Visual Analytics (VA) tool called DanteExploreVis. This tool was designed to aid domain experts in exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data from multiple perspectives. We discuss the design choices made and how each panel in the interface meets the domain requirements. We also present the results of a qualitative evaluation conducted with domain experts. The main contributions of this paper include: 1) the development of a VA tool to support domain experts in exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data; 2) a comprehensive documentation of the iterative design, development, and evaluation process following the variant Nine-Stage Framework; 3) a summary of the insights gained and lessons learned from this design study in the context of the humanities field; and 4) reflections on how our approach could be applied in a more generalizable way.
Visualizing Large-Scale Spatial Time Series with GeoChron
Authors: Zikun Deng, Shifu Chen, Tobias Schreck, Dazhen Deng, Tan Tang, Mingliang Xu, Di Weng, Yingcai Wu
Published at Vis, 2023

In geo-related fields such as urban informatics, atmospheric science, and geography, large-scale spatial time (ST) series (i.e., geo-referred time series) are collected for monitoring and understanding important spatiotemporal phenomena. ST series visualization is an effective means of understanding the data and reviewing spatiotemporal phenomena, which is a prerequisite for in-depth data analysis. However, visualizing these series is challenging due to their large scales, inherent dynamics, and spatiotemporal nature. In this study, we introduce the notion of patterns of evolution in ST series. Each evolution pattern is characterized by 1) a set of ST series that are close in space and 2) a time period when the trends of these ST series are correlated. We then leverage Storyline techniques by considering an analogy between evolution patterns and sessions, and finally design a novel visualization called GeoChron, which is capable of visualizing large-scale ST series in an evolution pattern-aware and narrative-preserving manner. GeoChron includes a mining framework to extract evolution patterns and two-level visualizations to enhance its visual scalability. We evaluate GeoChron with two case studies, an informal user study, an ablation study, parameter analysis, and running time analysis.
Vortex Lens: Interactive Vortex Core Line Extraction using Observed Line Integral Convolution
Authors: Peter Rautek, Xingdi Zhang, Bernhard Woschizka, Thomas Theußl, Markus Hadwiger
Published at Vis, 2023

This paper describes a novel method for detecting and visualizing vortex structures in unsteady 2D fluid flows. The method is based on an interactive local reference frame estimation that minimizes the observed time derivative of the input flow field $\mathrm{v}(x, t)$. A locally optimal reference frame $\mathrm{w}(x, t)$ assists the user in the identification of physically observable vortex structures in Observed Line Integral Convolution (LIC) visualizations. The observed LIC visualizations are interactively computed and displayed in a user-steered vortex lens region, embedded in the context of a conventional LIC visualization outside the lens. The locally optimal reference frame is then used to detect observed critical points, where $\mathrm{v}=\mathrm{w}$, which are used to seed vortex core lines. Each vortex core line is computed as a solution of the ordinary differential equation (ODE) $\dot{w}(t)=\mathrm{w}(w(t), t)$, with an observed critical point as initial condition $(w(t_{0}), t_{0})$. During integration, we enforce a strict error bound on the difference between the extracted core line and the integration of a path line of the input vector field, i.e., a solution to the ODE $\dot{v}(t)=\mathrm{v}(v(t), t)$. We experimentally verify that this error depends on the step size of the core line integration. This ensures that our method extracts Lagrangian vortex core lines that are the simultaneous solution of both ODEs with a numerical error that is controllable by the integration step size. We show the usability of our method in the context of an interactive system using a lens metaphor, and evaluate the results in comparison to state-of-the-art vortex core line extraction methods.
Why Change My Design: Explaining Poorly Constructed Visualization Designs with Explorable Explanations
Authors: Leo Yu-Ho Lo, Yifan Cao, Leni Yang, Huamin Qu
Published at Vis, 2023

Although visualization tools are widely available and accessible, not everyone knows the best practices and guidelines for creating accurate and honest visual representations of data. Numerous books and articles have been written to expose the misleading potential of poorly constructed charts and teach people how to avoid being deceived by them or making their own mistakes. These readings use various rhetorical devices to explain the concepts to their readers. In our analysis of a collection of books, online materials, and a design workshop, we identified six common explanation methods. To assess the effectiveness of these methods, we conducted two crowdsourced studies (each with $N=125$) to evaluate their ability to teach and persuade people to make design changes. In addition to these existing methods, we brought in the idea of Explorable Explanations, which allows readers to experiment with different chart settings and observe how the changes are reflected in the visualization. While we did not find significant differences across explanation methods, the results of our experiments indicate that, following the exposure to the explanations, the participants showed improved proficiency in identifying deceptive charts and were more receptive to proposed alterations of the visualization design. We discovered that participants were willing to accept more than 60% of the proposed adjustments in the persuasiveness assessment. Nevertheless, we found no significant differences among different explanation methods in convincing participants to accept the modifications.
Wizualization: A “Hard Magic” Visualization System for Immersive and Ubiquitous Analytics
Authors: Andrea Batch, Peter W. S. Butcher, Panagiotis D. Ritsos, Niklas Elmqvist
Published at Vis, 2023

What if magic could be used as an effective metaphor to perform data visualization and analysis using speech and gestures while mobile and on-the-go? In this paper, we introduce Wizualization, a visual analytics system for eXtended Reality (XR) that enables an analyst to author and interact with visualizations using such a magic system through gestures, speech commands, and touch interaction. Wizualization is a rendering system for current XR headsets that comprises several components: a cross-device (or Arcane Focuses) infrastructure for signalling and view control (Weave), a code notebook (Spellbook), and a grammar of graphics for XR (Optomancy). The system offers users three modes of input: gestures, spoken commands, and materials. We demonstrate Wizualization and its components using a motivating scenario on collaborative data analysis of pandemic data across time and space.
A Comparative Evaluation of Visual Summarization Techniques for Event Sequences
Authors: Kazi Tasnim Zinat, Jinhua Yang, Arjun Gandhi, Nistha Mitra, Zhicheng Liu
Published at EuroVis, 2023

Real‐world event sequences are often complex and heterogeneous, making it difficult to create meaningful visualizations using simple data aggregation and visual encoding techniques. Consequently, visualization researchers have developed numerous visual summarization techniques to generate concise overviews of sequential data. These techniques vary widely in terms of summary structures and contents, and currently there is a knowledge gap in understanding the effectiveness of these techniques. In this work, we present the design and results of an insight‐based crowdsourcing experiment evaluating three existing visual summarization techniques: CoreFlow, SentenTree, and Sequence Synopsis. We compare the visual summaries generated by these techniques across three tasks, on six datasets, at six levels of granularity. We analyze the effects of these variables on summary quality as rated by participants and completion time of the experiment tasks. Our analysis shows that Sequence Synopsis produces the highest‐quality visual summaries for all three tasks, but understanding Sequence Synopsis results also takes the longest time. We also find that the participants evaluate visual summary quality based on two aspects: content and interpretability. We discuss the implications of our findings on developing and evaluating new visual summarization techniques.
A Fully Integrated Pipeline for Visual Carotid Morphology Analysis
Authors: Pepe Eulzer, Fabienne von Deylen, Chan-Wei Hsu, Ralph Wickenhöfer, Carsten M. Klingner, Kai Lawonn
Published at EuroVis, 2023

Analyzing stenoses of the internal carotids – local constrictions of the artery – is a critical clinical task in cardiovascular disease treatment and prevention. For this purpose, we propose a self‐contained pipeline for the visual analysis of carotid artery geometries. The only inputs are computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans, which are already recorded in clinical routine. We show how integrated model extraction and visualization can help to efficiently detect stenoses and we provide means for automatic, highly accurate stenosis degree computation. We directly connect multiple sophisticated processing stages, including a neural prediction network for lumen and plaque segmentation and automatic global diameter computation. We enable interactive and retrospective user control over the processing stages. Our aims are to increase user trust by making the underlying data validatable on the fly, to decrease adoption costs by minimizing external dependencies, and to optimize scalability by streamlining the data processing. We use interactive visualizations for data inspection and adaption to guide the user through the processing stages. The framework was developed and evaluated in close collaboration with radiologists and neurologists. It has been used to extract and analyze over 100 carotid bifurcation geometries and is built with a modular architecture, available as an extendable open‐source platform.
Been There, Seen That: Visualization of Movement and 3D Eye Tracking Data from Real-World Environments
Authors: Nelusa Pathmanathan, Seyda Öney, Michael Becher, Michael Sedlmair, Daniel Weiskopf, Kuno Kurzhals
Published at EuroVis, 2023

The distribution of visual attention can be evaluated using eye tracking, providing valuable insights into usability issues and interaction patterns. However, when used in real, augmented, and collaborative environments, new challenges arise that go beyond desktop scenarios and purely virtual environments. Toward addressing these challenges, we present a visualization technique that provides complementary views on the movement and eye tracking data recorded from multiple people in real‐world environments. Our method is based on a space‐time cube visualization and a linked 3D replay of recorded data. We showcase our approach with an experiment that examines how people investigate an artwork collection. The visualization provides insights into how people moved and inspected individual pictures in their spatial context over time. In contrast to existing methods, this analysis is possible for multiple participants without extensive annotation of areas of interest. Our technique was evaluated with a think‐aloud experiment to investigate analysis strategies and an interview with domain experts to examine the applicability in other research fields.
Belief Decay or Persistence? A Mixed-method Study on Belief Movement Over Time
Authors: Shrey Gupta, Alireza Karduni, Emily Wall
Published at EuroVis, 2023

When individuals encounter new information (data), that information is incorporated with their existing beliefs (prior) to form a new belief (posterior) in a process referred to as belief updating. While most studies on rational belief updating in visual data analysis elicit beliefs immediately after data is shown, we posit that there may be critical movement in an individual's beliefs when elicited immediately after data is shown v. after a temporal delay (e.g., due to forgetfulness or weak incorporation of the data). Our paper investigates the hypothesis that posterior beliefs elicited after a time interval will “decay” back towards the prior beliefs compared to the posterior beliefs elicited immediately after new data is presented. In this study, we recruit 101 participants to complete three tasks where beliefs are elicited immediately after seeing new data and again after a brief distractor task. We conduct (1) a quantitative analysis of the results to understand if there are any systematic differences in beliefs elicited immediately after seeing new data or after a distractor task and (2) a qualitative analysis of participants' reflections on the reasons for their belief update. While we find no statistically significant global trends across the participants beliefs elicited immediately v. after the delay, the qualitative analysis provides rich insight into the reasons for an individual's belief movement across 9 prototypical scenarios, which includes (i) decay of beliefs as a result of either forgetting the information shown or strongly held prior beliefs, (ii) strengthening of confidence in updated beliefs by positively integrating the new data and (iii) maintaining a consistently updated belief over time, among others. These results can guide subsequent experiments to disambiguate when and by what mechanism new data is truly incorporated into one's belief system.
Beyond Alternative Text and Tables: Comparative Analysis of Visualization Tools and Accessibility Methods
Authors: Nam Wook Kim, Grace Ataguba, Shakila Cherise Joyner, Chuangdian Zhao, Hyejin Im
Published at EuroVis, 2023

Modern visualization software and programming libraries have made data visualization construction easier for everyone. However, the extent of accessibility design they support for blind and low‐vision people is relatively unknown. It is also unclear how they can improve chart content accessibility beyond conventional alternative text and data tables. To address these issues, we examined the current accessibility features in popular visualization tools, revealing limited support for the standard accessibility methods and scarce support for chart content exploration. Next, we investigate two promising accessibility approaches that provide off‐the‐shelf solutions for chart content accessibility: structured navigation and conversational interaction. We present a comparative evaluation study and discuss what to consider when incorporating them into visualization tools.
ChemoGraph: Interactive Visual Exploration of the Chemical Space
Authors: Bharat Kale, Austin Clyde, Maoyuan Sun, Arvind Ramanathan, Rick L. Stevens, Michael E. Papka
Published at EuroVis, 2023

Exploratory analysis of the chemical space is an important task in the field of cheminformatics. For example, in drug discovery research, chemists investigate sets of thousands of chemical compounds in order to identify novel yet structurally similar synthetic compounds to replace natural products. Manually exploring the chemical space inhabited by all possible molecules and chemical compounds is impractical, and therefore presents a challenge. To fill this gap, we present ChemoGraph, a novel visual analytics technique for interactively exploring related chemicals. In ChemoGraph, we formalize a chemical space as a hypergraph and apply novel machine learning models to compute related chemical compounds. It uses a database to find related compounds from a known space and a machine learning model to generate new ones, which helps enlarge the known space. Moreover, ChemoGraph highlights interactive features that support users in viewing, comparing, and organizing computationally identified related chemicals. With a drug discovery usage scenario and initial expert feedback from a case study, we demonstrate the usefulness of ChemoGraph.
DASS Good: Explainable Data Mining of Spatial Cohort Data
Authors: Andrew Wentzel, Carla Floricel, Guadalupe Canahuate, Mohamed A. Naser, Abdallah S. Mohamed, Clifton D. Fuller, Lisanne van Dijk, G. Elisabeta Marai
Published at EuroVis, 2023

Developing applicable clinical machine learning models is a difficult task when the data includes spatial information, for example, radiation dose distributions across adjacent organs at risk. We describe the co‐design of a modeling system, DASS, to support the hybrid human‐machine development and validation of predictive models for estimating long‐term toxicities related to radiotherapy doses in head and neck cancer patients. Developed in collaboration with domain experts in oncology and data mining, DASS incorporates human‐in‐the‐loop visual steering, spatial data, and explainable AI to augment domain knowledge with automatic data mining. We demonstrate DASS with the development of two practical clinical stratification models and report feedback from domain experts. Finally, we describe the design lessons learned from this collaborative experience.
Data Stories of Water: Studying the Communicative Role of Data Visualizations within Long-form Journalism
Authors: Manuela Garretón, Francesca Morini, Daniela Paz Moyano, Gianna-Carina Grün, Denis Parra
Published at EuroVis, 2023

We present a methodology for making sense of the communicative role of data visualizations in journalistic storytelling and share findings from surveying water‐related data stories. Data stories are a genre of long‐form journalism that integrate text, data visualization, and other visual expressions (e.g., photographs, illustrations, videos) for the purpose of data‐driven storytelling. In the last decade, a considerable number of data stories about a wide range of topics have been published worldwide. Authors use a variety of techniques to make complex phenomena comprehensible and use visualizations as communicative devices that shape the understanding of a given topic. Despite the popularity of data stories, we, as scholars, still lack a methodological framework for assessing the communicative role of visualizations in data stories. To this extent, we draw from data journalism, visual culture, and multimodality studies to propose an interpretative framework in six stages. The process begins with the analysis of content blocks and framing elements and ends with the identification of dimensions, patterns, and relationships between textual and visual elements. The framework is put to the test by analyzing 17 data stories about water‐related issues. Our observations from the survey illustrate how data visualizations can shape the framing of complex topics.