Petra Isenberg

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, 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 it 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 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.

PolemicTweet: Video Annotation and Analysis through Tagged Tweets

We present PolemicTweet a system with an encompassing, economic, and engaging approach to video tagging and analysis. Annotating and tagging videos manually is a boring and time-consuming process. Yet, in the last couple of years the audiences of events—such as academic conferences—have begun to produce unexploited metadata in the form of micropost activities. With PolemicTweet we explore the use of tagged microposts for both video annotation and browsing aid. PolemicTweet is a system 1) to crowd source conference video tagging with structured sentiment metadata, 2) to engage audiences in a tagging process, and 3) to visualize these annotations for browsing and analyzing a video. We describe the the system and its components as well as the results from a one-year live deployment in 27 different events.

Eliciting Multi-touch Selection Gestures for Interactive Data Graphics

We report the results of a study in which we elicited selection gestures for multi-touch data graphics. The selection of data items is a common and extremely important form of interaction with data graphics, and serves as the basis for many other data interaction techniques. However, interactive charting tools for multi-touch displays typically only provide dedicated multi-touch gestures for single-point selection or zooming. Our study used gesture elicitation to explore a wider range of possible selection interactions for multi-touch data graphics. The results show a strong preference for simple, one-handed selection gestures. They also show that users tend to interact with chart axes and make figurative selection gestures outside the chart, rather than interact with the visual marks themselves. Finally, we found strong consensus around several unique selection gestures related to visual chart features.

Immersive Visual Data Stories

We discuss opportunities and challenges for making people experience immersion when interacting with visual data stories. Even though visual data stories are an important means for communicating information, the extent to which viewers feel immersed in such stories has so far been hardly explored. In this chapter, we explore the concept of immersion in visual data stories from the viewpoint of related disciplines in which narratives play an important role. We pay special attention to games research, which shares a focus on graphics and interactivity with our context of visual data stories. From this exploration we derive research opportunities and challenges for immersion in visual data stories.