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This paper investigates the role of text in visualizations, specifically the impact of text position, semantic content, and biased wording. Two empirical studies were conducted based on two tasks (predicting data trends and appraising bias) using two visualization types (bar and line charts). While the addition of text had a minimal effect on how people perceive data trends, there was a significant impact on how biased they perceive the authors to be. This finding revealed a relationship between the degree of bias in textual information and the perception of the authors' bias. Exploratory analyses support an interaction between a person's prediction and the degree of bias they perceived. This paper also develops a crowdsourced method for creating chart annotations that range from neutral to highly biased. This research highlights the need for designers to mitigate potential polarization of readers' opinions based on how authors' ideas are expressed.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Exploring annotation taxonomy in grouped bar charts: A qualitative classroom study
Annotations are an essential part of data analysis and communication in visualizations, which focus a readers attention on critical visual elements (e.g. an arrow that emphasizes a downward trend in a bar chart). Annotations enhance comprehension, mental organization, memorability, user engagement, and interaction and are crucial for data externalization and exploration, collaborative data analysis, and narrative storytelling in visualizations. However, we have identified a general lack of understanding of how people annotate visualizations to support effective communication. In this study, we evaluate how visualization students annotate grouped bar charts when answering high-level questions about the data. The resulting annotations were qualitatively coded to generate a taxonomy of how they leverage different visual elements to communicate critical information. We found that the annotations used significantly varied by the task they were supporting and that whereas several annotation types supported many tasks, others were usable only in special cases. We also found that some tasks were so challenging that ensembles of annotations were necessary to support the tasks sufficiently. The resulting taxonomy of approaches provides a foundation for understanding the usage of annotations in broader contexts to help visualizations achieve their desired message.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2320920
- PAR ID:
- 10630408
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage Journals
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Information Visualization
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1473-8716
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 79 to 94
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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