An exploratory study of co-located collaborative visual analytics around a tabletop display (original) (raw)
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Co-Located Collaborative Visual Analytics around a Tabletop Display
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2012
Co-located collaboration can be extremely valuable during complex visual analytics tasks. We present an exploratory study of a system designed to support collaborative visual analysis tasks on a digital tabletop display. Fifteen participant pairs employed Cambiera, a visual analytics system, to solve a problem involving 240 digital documents. Our analysis, supported by observations, system logs, questionnaires, and interview data, explores how pairs approached the problem around the table. We contribute a unique, rich understanding of how users worked together around the table and identify eight types of collaboration styles that can be used to identify how closely people work together while problem solving. We show how the closeness of teams' collaboration and communication influenced how they performed on the task overall. We further discuss the role of the tabletop for visual analytics tasks and derive design implications for future co-located collaborative tabletop problem solving systems.
Supporting note taking in co-located collaborative visual analytics on large interactive surfaces
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces - ITS '11, 2011
My research examines how to support note taking in colocated collaborative visual data analysis. My preliminary observational study revealed the importance of note taking as one of the main analytical processes. This finding motivated me to further investigate note taking in the context of co-located collaborative visual analytics. I participated in designing and implementing CoSpaces, a tool specifically tailored for collaborative visual data analysis on tabletop displays. This tool provides a framework for collaborative data analysis, in which note taking mechanisms can be studied. Initially a simple note taking mechanism involving text notes recorded via an on-screen keyboard was implemented. However, a usability study found this to be insufficient. Because of my observation that users frequently used the automatically created links between notes and visualizations to access more information, I aim to investigate the effects of semi-automatic note taking mechanisms built into a collaborative visual analysis tool. I am planning to provide analysts with editable note-templates populated with information related to the current line of inquiry. I hypothesize that note-templates could improve the collaboration process by improving the structure of notes for group use. Evaluation will be done through qualitative user studies. Findings of this research will inform the design of future collaborative tools for visual analysis of data.
A closer look at note taking in the co-located collaborative visual analytics process
2010
This paper highlights the important role that record-keeping (i.e. taking notes and saving charts) plays in collaborative data analysis within the business domain. The discussion of record-keeping is based on observations from a user study in which 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 note taking as one of the main activities. We observed that recordkeeping was a critical activity within the analysis process. 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 implications for the design of collaborative visual analytics tools.
VisTACO: Visualizing Tabletop Collaboration
As we design tabletop technologies, it is important to also understand how they are being used. Many prior researchers have developed visualizations of interaction data from their studies to illustrate ideas and concepts. In this work, we develop an interactional model of tabletop collaboration, which informs the design of VisTACO, an interactive visualization tool for tabletop collaboration. Using Vis-TACO, we can explore the interactions of collaborators with the tabletop to identify patterns or unusual spatial behaviours, supporting the analysis process. VisTACO helps bridge the gap between observing the use of a tabletop system, and understanding users" interactions with the system.
CoSpaces: Workspaces to Support Co-located Collaborative Visual Analytics
By design, interactive tabletops and surfaces provide numerous opportunities for data visualization and analysis. In information visualization, scientific visualization, and visual analytics, useful insights primarily emerge from interactive data exploration. Nevertheless, interaction research in these domains has largely focused on mouse-based interactions in the past, with little research on how interactive data exploration can benefit from interactive surfaces. These proceedings represent the results of the DEXIS 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces. It was held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (ITS) in Kobe, Japan on November 13, 2011. The introduction summarizes the published papers of the workshop and points to results from workshop discussions. The remainder of the proceedings is made up of the position papers submitted to the workshop.
Lark: Coordinating Co-Located Collaboration With Information Visualization
IEEE Transactions on …, 2009
Abstract—Large multi-touch displays are expanding the possibilities of multiple-coordinated views by allowing multiple people to in-teract with data in concert or independently. We present Lark, a system that facilitates the coordination of interactions with information ...
Designing a collaborative visual analytics system to support users’ continuous analytical processes
Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 2015
In recent, numerous useful visual analytics tools have been designed to help domain experts solve analytical problems. However, most of the tools do not reflect the nature of solving real-world analytical tasks collaboratively because they have been designed for single users in desktop environments. In this paper, a complete visual analytics system is designed for solving real-world tasks having two integrated components: a single-user desktop system and an extended system suitable for a collaborative environment. Specifically, we designed a collaborative touch-table application (iPCA-CE) by adopting an existing single-user desktop analytical tool (iPCA). With the system, users can actively transit from individual desktop to shared collaborative environments without losing track of their analysis. They can also switch their analytical processes from collaborative to single-user workflows. To understand the usefulness of the system for solving analytical problems, we conducted a user...
Analysts are increasingly encountering datasets that are larger and more complex than ever before. Effectively exploring such datasets requires collaboration between multiple analysts, who more often than not are distributed in time or in space. Mixed-presence groupware provide a shared workspace medium that supports this combination of colocated and distributed collaboration. However, collaborative visualization systems for such distributed settings have their own cost and are still uncommon in the visualization community. We present Hugin, a novel layer-based graphical framework for this kind of mixed-presence synchronous collaborative visualization over digital tabletop displays. The design of the framework focuses on issues like awareness and access control, while using information visualization for the collaborative data exploration on network-connected tabletops. To validate the usefulness of the framework, we also present examples of how Hugin can be used to implement new visualizations supporitng these collaborative mechanisms.
2010
Analysts are increasingly encountering datasets that are larger and more complex than ever before. Effectively exploring such datasets requires collaboration between multiple analysts, who more often than not are distributed in time or in space. Mixed-presence groupware provide a shared workspace medium that supports this combination of colocated and distributed collaboration. However, collaborative visualization systems for such distributed settings have their own cost and are still uncommon in the visualization community. We present Hugin, a novel layer-based graphical framework for this kind of mixed-presence synchronous collaborative visualization over digital tabletop displays. The design of the framework focuses on issues like awareness and access control, while using information visualization for the collaborative data exploration on network-connected tabletops. To validate the usefulness of the framework, we also present examples of how Hugin can be used to implement new visualizations supporitng these collaborative mechanisms.