VizCept: Supporting synchronous collaboration for constructing visualizations in intelligence analysis

Disperse: Enabling Web-Based Visualization in Multi-screen and Multi-user Environments

“…One of the biggest challenges of DUI's, however, is maintaining clear boundaries between development, deployment, and usage. Many efforts in this space require developers to have some understanding of the deployment environment, which can involve custom synchronization software [11,14,17,34] and/or pre-determined tasks [7,8,16], and end users must have these environments available to them and properly configured. This can be a steep requirement for real world meetings, which get scheduled on the fly, can be brief in duration, and frequently involve non-technical users.…”

Effects of implicit sharing in collaborative analysis

“…Such sharing can improve both process and performance in collaborative sensemaking and analysis tasks, measured by accuracy of task outcomes [19,39] and recall of decisions [13]. Sharing can also help analysts flexibly organize data to discover insights and form schemas [39,40] or concept maps [15], identify and link evidence from different sources [4,6], identify entities in the data [9], and encounter otherwise hidden and overlooked connections between pieces of information [1,9,11,25], leading to better decisions [19]. The success of shared workspaces in team performance has been attributed to promoting exchange of information and data with others [19], as a result improved common ground [39] and awareness of the status of the analysis task and others' activities in the task [13,34].…”

“…We focus on insights (e.g., hypotheses about who committed a crime, which analysts often find valuable for joint analysis [3]) rather than raw data and facts (e.g., clues from missing women reports) because the latter is often subject to organizational policies and norms of sharing [10]. Thus, unlike other studies (e.g., [9,19]) we assume that analysts do not-and should not-necessarily have access to others' raw data sources: separation of information represents organizational boundaries and individual expertise [13]. Instead, as analysts make their own notes about insights from their own evidence, those notes are automatically shared with their partners.…”

“…Most previous work evaluated collaborative analysis tools with a handful of participants without comparing tools to alternatives [3,9,34,40], by running a solo study [23], by studying explicit knowledge sharing [11,13], or have not evaluated the tools with human participants at all [30,32,35]. In this paper we present a methodical study that demonstrated the benefit of a specific design feature, implicit knowledge sharing, on the process and outcomes of a collaborative analysis task.…”

Supporting effective common ground construction in Asynchronous Collaborative Visual Analytics

“…In synchronous collaborative visual analytics systems, common ground is usually established through real time shared views and instant communication mechanisms. For example, VizCept [10] allows users to keep track of each other's findings and relations in a shared concept map. Users can refer to such a shared view to ground their actions.…”