Jean-Daniel Fekete

Excentric labeling: dynamic neighborhood labeling for data visualization

The widespread use of information visualization is hampered bythe lack of effective labeling techniques. An informal taxonomy oflabeling methods is proposed. We then describe excentric labeling,a new dynamic technique to label a neighborhood of objects locatedaround the cursor. This technique does not intrude into theexisting interaction, it is not computationally intensive, and waseasily applied to several visualization applications. A pilot studywith eight subjects indicates a strong speed benefit over a zoominterface for tasks that involve the exploration of large numbersof objects. Observations and comments from users are presented.

Interactive information visualization of a million items

Existing information visualization techniques are usually limited to the display of a few thousand items. This article describes new interactive techniques capable of handling a million items (effectively visible and manageable on screen). We evaluate the use of hardware-based techniques available with newer graphics cards, as well as new animation techniques and non-standard graphical features such as stereovision and overlap count. These techniques have been applied to two popular information visualizations: treemaps and scatter plot diagrams; but are generic enough to be applied to other 2D representations as well.

Input Device Selection and Interaction Configuration with ICON

This paper describes ICON, a novel editor designed to configure a set of input devices and connect them to actions into a graphical interactive application. ICON allows ‘power users’ to customise the way an application manages its input to suit their needs. New configurations can be designed to help physically challenged users to use alternative input methods, or skilled users — graphic designers or musicians for example — to use their favourite input devices and interaction techniques (bimanual, voice enabled, etc.).

Compus: visualization and analysis of structured documents for understanding social life in the 16th century

This article describes the Compus visualization system that assists in the exploration and analysis of structured document corpora encoded in XML. Compus has been developed for and applied to a corpus of 100 French manuscript letters of the 16th century, transcribed and encoded for scholarly analysis using the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative. By providing a synoptic visualization of a corpus and allowing for dynamic queries and structural transformations, Compus assists researchers in finding regularities or discrepancies, leading to a higher level analysis of historic source. Compus can be used with other richly encoded text corpora as well.

Supporting Historical Research Through User-Centered Visual Analytics

In this paper we describe the development and evaluation of a visual analytics tool to support historical research. Historians continuously gather data related to their scholarly research from archival visits and background search. Organising and making sense of all this data can be challenging as many historians continue to rely on analog or basic digital tools. We built an integrated note-taking environment for historians which unifies a set of func-tionalities we identified as important for historical research including editing, tagging, searching, sharing and visualization. Our approach was to involve users from the initial stage of brainstorming and requirement analysis through to design, implementation and evaluation. We report on the process and results of our work, and conclude by reflecting on our own experience in conducting user-centered visual analytics design for digital humanities.

Excentric Labeling: Dynamic Neighborhood Labeling for Data Visualization

The widespread use of information visualization is hampered by the lack of effective labeling techniques. An informal taxonomy of labeling methods is proposed. We then describe “excentric labeling”, a new dynamic technique to label a neighborhood of objects located around the cursor. This technique does not intrude into the existing interaction, it is not computationally intensive, and was easily applied to several visualization applications. A pilot study with eight subjects indicates a strong speed benefit over a zoom interface for tasks that involve the exploration of large numbers of objects. Observations and comments from users are presented.