TimeSplines: Sketch-Based Authoring of Flexible and Idiosyncratic Timelines.

Timelines are essential for visually communicating chronological narratives and reflecting on the personal and cultural significance of historical events. Existing visualization tools tend to support conventional linear representations, but fail to capture personal idiosyncratic conceptualizations of time. In response, we built TimeSplines, a visualization authoring tool that allows people to sketch multiple free-form temporal axes and populate them with heterogeneous, time-oriented data via incremental and lazy data binding.

Generative Design Inspiration for Glyphs with Diatoms.

We introduce Diatoms, a technique that generates design inspiration for glyphs by sampling from palettes of mark shapes, encoding channels, and glyph scaffold shapes. Diatoms allows for a degree of randomness while respecting constraints imposed by columns in a data table: their data types and domains as well as semantic associations between columns as specified by the designer. We pair this generative design process with two forms of interactive design externalization that enable comparison and critique of the design alternatives.

From Jam Session to Recital: Synchronous Communication and Collaboration Around Data in Organizations.

Prior research on communicating with visualization has focused on public presentation and asynchronous individual consumption, such as in the domain of journalism. The visualization research community knows comparatively little about synchronous and multimodal communication around data within organizations, from team meetings to executive briefings. We conducted two qualitative interview studies with individuals who prepare and deliver presentations about data to audiences in organizations.

QualDash: Adaptable Generation of Visualisation Dashboards for Healthcare Quality Improvement.

Adapting dashboard design to different contexts of use is an open question in visualisation research. Dashboard designers often seek to strike a balance between dashboard adaptability and ease-of-use, and in hospitals challenges arise from the vast diversity of key metrics, data models and users involved at different organizational levels. In this design study, we present QualDash, a dashboard generation engine that allows for the dynamic configuration and deployment of visualisation dashboards for healthcare quality improvement (QI).

Critical Reflections on Visualization Authoring Systems.

An emerging generation of visualization authoring systems support expressive information visualization without textual programming. As they vary in their visualization models, system architectures, and user interfaces, it is challenging to directly compare these systems using traditional evaluative methods. Recognizing the value of contextualizing our decisions in the broader design space, we present critical reflections on three systems we developed -Lyra, Data Illustrator, and Charticulator.

A Comparative Evaluation of Animation and Small Multiples for Trend Visualization on Mobile Phones.

We compare the efficacy of animated and small multiples variants of scatterplots on mobile phones for comparing trends in multivariate datasets. Visualization is increasingly prevalent in mobile applications and mobile-first websites, yet there is little prior visualization research dedicated to small displays. In this paper, we build upon previous experimental research carried out on larger displays that assessed animated and non-animated variants of scatterplots.

Visualizing Ranges over Time on Mobile Phones: A Task-Based Crowdsourced Evaluation.

In the first crowdsourced visualization experiment conducted exclusively on mobile phones, we compare approaches to visualizing ranges over time on small displays. People routinely consume such data via a mobile phone, from temperatures in weather forecasting apps to sleep and blood pressure readings in personal health apps. However, we lack guidance on how to effectively visualize ranges on small displays in the context of different value retrieval and comparison tasks, or with respect to different data characteristics such as periodicity, seasonality, or the cardinality of ranges.

Charticulator: Interactive Construction of Bespoke Chart Layouts.

We present Charticulator, an interactive authoring tool that enables the creation of bespoke and reusable chart layouts. Charticulator is our response to most existing chart construction interfaces that require authors to choose from predefined chart layouts, thereby precluding the construction of novel charts. In contrast, Charticulator transforms a chart specification into mathematical layout constraints and automatically computes a set of layout attributes using a constraint-solving algorithm to realize the chart.

Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling.

There are many ways to visualize event sequences as timelines. In a storytelling context where the intent is to convey multiple narrative points, a richer set of timeline designs may be more appropriate than the narrow range that has been used for exploratory data analysis by the research community. Informed by a survey of 263 timelines, we present a design space for storytelling with timelines that balances expressiveness and effectiveness, identifying 14 design choices characterized by three dimensions: representation, scale, and layout.

Overview: The Design, Adoption, and Analysis of a Visual Document Mining Tool for Investigative Journalists.

For an investigative journalist, a large collection of documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request or a leak is both a blessing and a curse: such material may contain multiple newsworthy stories, but it can be difficult and time consuming to find relevant documents. Standard text search is useful, but even if the search target is known it may not be possible to formulate an effective query. In addition, summarization is an important non-search task.

Matches, Mismatches, and Methods: Multiple-View Workflows for Energy Portfolio Analysis.

The energy performance of large building portfolios is challenging to analyze and monitor, as current analysis tools are not scalable or they present derived and aggregated data at too coarse of a level. We conducted a visualization design study, beginning with a thorough work domain analysis and a characterization of data and task abstractions. We describe generalizable visual encoding design choices for time-oriented data framed in terms of matches and mismatches, as well as considerations for workflow design.

C-TOC (Cognitive Testing on Computer): investigating the usability and validity of a novel self-administered cognitive assessment tool in aging and early dementia.

Introduction: Cognitive Testing on Computer (C-TOC) is a novel computer-based test battery developed to improve both usability and validity in the computerized assessment of cognitive function in older adults.

Methods: C-TOC's usability was evaluated concurrently with its iterative development to version 4 in subjects with and without cognitive impairment, and health professional advisors representing different ethnocultural groups. C-TOC version 4 was then validated against neuropsychological tests (NPTs), and by comparing performance scores of subjects with normal cognition, Cognitive Impairment Not Dementia (CIND) and Alzheimer disease.

A multi-level typology of abstract visualization tasks.

The considerable previous work characterizing visualization usage has focused on low-level tasks or interactions and high-level tasks, leaving a gap between them that is not addressed. This gap leads to a lack of distinction between the ends and means of a task, limiting the potential for rigorous analysis. We contribute a multi-level typology of visualization tasks to address this gap, distinguishing why and how a visualization task is performed, as well as what the task inputs and outputs are.