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Data analysis involves constantly formulating and testing new hypotheses and questions about data. When dealing with a new dataset, especially one with many dimensions, it can be cumbersome for the analyst to clearly remember which aspects of the data have been investigated (i.e., visually examined for patterns, trends, outliers etc.) and which combinations have not. Yet this information is critical to help the analyst formulate new questions that they have not already answered. We observe that for tabular data, questions are typically comprised of varying combinations of data dimensions (e.g., what are the trends of Sales and Profit for different Regions?). We propose representing analysis history from the angle of dimension coverage (i.e., which data dimensions have been investigated and in which combinations). We use scented widgets [30] to incorporate dimension coverage of the analysts' past work into interaction widgets of a visualization tool. We demonstrate how this approach can assist analysts with the question formation process. Our approach extends the concept of scented widgets to reveal aspects of one's own analysis history, and offers a different perspective on one's past work than typical visualization history tools. Results of our empirical study showed that participants with access to embedded dimension coverage information relied on this information when formulating questions, asked more questions about the data, generated more top-level findings, and showed greater breadth of their analysis without sacrificing depth.

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Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees' feedback in reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing system that captures attendees' feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees' feedback and organizers' tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incorporated into an interactive authoring tool for organizers to write reports. From a field experiment at a town hall meeting, we demonstrate how CommunityClick can improve inclusivity by providing multiple avenues for attendees to share opinions. Additionally, interviews with eight expert organizers demonstrate CommunityClick's utility in creating more comprehensive and accurate reports to inform critical civic decision-making. We discuss the possibility of integrating CommunityClick with town hall meetings in the future as well as expanding to other domains.

In an observational study, we noticed that record-keeping plays a critical role in the overall process of collaborative visual data analysis. Record-keeping involves recording material for later use, ranging from data about the visual analysis processes and visualization states to notes and annotations that externalize user insights, findings, and hypotheses. In our study, co-located teams worked on collaborative visual analytics tasks using large interactive wall and tabletop displays. Part of our findings is a collaborative data analysis framework that encompasses record-keeping as one of the main activities. In this paper, our primary focus is on note-taking activity. Based on our observations, we characterize notes according to their content, scope, and usage, and describe how they fit into a process of collaborative data analysis. We then discuss suggestions to improve the design of note-taking functionality for co-located collaborative visual analytics tools.