Capturing and supporting the analysis process

Abstract

Visual analytics tools provide powerful visual representations in order to support the sense-making process. In this process, analysts typically iterate through sequences of steps many times, varying parameters each time. Few visual analytics tools support this process well, nor do they provide support for visualizing and understanding the analysis process itself. To help analysts understand, explore, reference, and reuse their analysis process, we present a visual analytics system named CzSaw (See-Saw) that provides an editable and re-playable history navigation channel in addition to multiple visual representations of document collections and the entities within them (in a manner inspired by Jigsaw [24]). Conventional history navigation tools range from basic undo and redo to branching timelines of user actions. In CzSaw's approach to this, first, user interactions are translated into a script language that drives the underlying scripting-driven propagation system. The latter allows analysts to edit analysis steps, and ultimately to program them. Second, on this base, we build both a history view showing progress and alternative paths, and a dependency graph showing the underlying logic of the analysis and dependency relations among the results of each step. These tools result in a visual model of the sense-making process, providing a way for analysts to visualize their analysis process, to reinterpret the problem, explore alternative paths, extract analysis patterns from existing history, and reuse them with other related analyses.

An Affordance-Based Framework for Human Computation and Human-Computer Collaboration

“…In presenting a preliminary framework for describing and comparing systems involving human and machine collaborators, we aspire to lay the foundation for a more rigorous analysis of the tools and approaches presented by our field, thereby paving the way for the construction of an increasingly robust understanding of analytical reasoning and how to best support insight generation. [41] CrowdSearch [80] ParallelTopics [23] Dissimilarity [50] VH+ML [28] Implicit tagging [62] reCAPTCHA [77] VizWiz [10] Phetch [74] ESP Game [73] KissKissBan [33] LabelMe [59] Ka-captcha [21] PeekABoom [76] MRI [12] iView [83] iVisClassifier [18] Saliency [37] RP Explorer [3] DimStiller [36] WireVis [46] Action trails [65] NetClinic [47] Trajectories [4] Risk assessment [51] Automatic transfer functions [57] MDX [66] Automated+viz [68] CzSaw [39] Fold.it [20] HRI scripts [17] Animated agents for VR [56] VA Model-learning [29] EyeSpy [6] MonoTrans2 [35] CastingWords [16] Click2Annotate [15] Wrangler [40] Soylent [8] Crowdsourced solutions [67] Crowdsourced design [81] Stress OutSourced …”

“…It has also been utilized to refine classification models and performing dimension reduction [18,29,51], interactively cluster data [4], and automatically extract transfer functions from user-selected data [57]. It has been used to suggest informative data views [83], and even to help users externalize and understand their own insight generation process [15,39,41,46,65].…”

“…The study of general human-computer collaboration offers a plethora of examples of successful human/machine teams [15,23,37,39,41,46,50,65,66,68,83]. Developments in supervised machine learning in the visualization community present several vetted techniques for human intervention into computationally complex tasks [3,4,12,18,28,29,36,47,51,57].…”

Interaction in the Visualization of Multivariate Networks

“…The CZSaw system [38] keeps track of all interactions and allows the user to explore and share them.…”

SocialNetSense: Supporting sensemaking of social and structural features in networks with interactive visualization

“…Jigsaw [44] uses visualization tools to identify key information entities and their relationships in support of the sensemaking of a large collection of text documents. CzSaw [24] supports iterative analysis of document collection with editable and re-playable history navigation. Sandbox [46] enables users to search, collect, organize and marshal evidences to make sense documents in a visual space.…”