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Visualization grammars, often based on the Grammar of Graphics (GoG), have much potential for augmenting data analysis in a programming environment. However, we do not know how analysts conceptualize grammar abstractions, or how a visualization grammar works with data analysis in practice. Therefore, we qualitatively analyzed how experienced analysts (N = 6) from TidyTuesday, a social data project, wrangled and visualized data using GoG-based ggplot2 without given tasks in R Markdown. Though participants’ analysis and customization needs could mismatch with GoG component design, their analysis processes aligned with the goal of GoG to expedite visualization iteration. We also found a feedback loop and tight coupling between visualization and data transformation code, explaining both participants’ productivity and their errors. From these results, we discuss how future visualization grammars can become more practical for analysts and how visualization grammar and analysis tools can better integrate within a programming (i.e., computational notebook) environment.
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Data Abstraction Elephants: The Initial Diversity of Data Representations and Mental Models
Two people looking at the same dataset will create different mental models, prioritize different attributes, and connect with different visualizations. We seek to understand the space of data abstractions associated with mental models and how well people communicate their mental models when sketching. Data abstractions have a profound influence on the visualization design, yet it’s unclear how universal they may be when not initially influenced by a representation. We conducted a study about how people create their mental models from a dataset. Rather than presenting tabular data, we presented each participant with one of three datasets in paragraph form, to avoid biasing the data abstraction and mental model. We observed various mental models, data abstractions, and depictions from the same dataset, and how these concepts are influenced by communication and purpose-seeking. Our results have implications for visualization design, especially during the discovery and data collection phase.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2324465
- PAR ID:
- 10435516
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 24
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580669
