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Item Structure and Empathy in Visual Data Storytelling: Evaluating their Influence on Attitude(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Liem, Johannes; Perin, Charles; Wood, Jo; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaIn the visualization community, it is often assumed that visual data storytelling increases memorability and engagement, making it more effective at communicating information. However, many assumptions about the efficacy of storytelling in visualization lack empirical evaluation. Contributing to an emerging body of work, we study whether selected techniques commonly used in visual data storytelling influence people's attitudes towards immigration. We compare (a) personal visual narratives designed to generate empathy; (b) structured visual narratives of aggregates of people; and (c) an exploratory visualization without narrative acting as a control condition. We conducted two crowdsourced between-subject studies comparing the three conditions, each with 300 participants. To assess the differences in attitudes between conditions, we adopted established scales from the social sciences used in the European Social Survey (ESS). Although we found some differences between conditions, the effects on people's attitudes are smaller than we expected. Our findings suggest that we need to be more careful when it comes to our expectations about the effects visual data storytelling can have on attitudes.Item Optimal Axes for Data Value Estimation in Star Coordinates and Radial Axes Plots(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Rubio-Sánchez, Manuel; Lehmann, Dirk J.; Sanchez, Alberto; Rojo-Álvarez, Jose Luis; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonRadial axes plots are projection methods that represent high-dimensional data samples as points on a two-dimensional plane. These techniques define mappings through a set of axis vectors, each associated with a data variable, which users can manipulate interactively to create different plots and analyze data from multiple points of view. However, updating the direction and length of an axis vector is far from trivial. Users must consider the data analysis task, domain knowledge, the directions in which values should increase, the relative importance of each variable, or the correlations between variables, among other factors. Another issue is the difficulty to approximate high-dimensional data values in the two-dimensional visualizations, which can hamper searching for data with particular characteristics, analyzing the most common data values in clusters, inspecting outliers, etc. In this paper we present and analyze several optimization approaches for enhancing radial axes plots regarding their ability to represent high-dimensional data values. The techniques can be used not only to approximate data values with greater accuracy, but also to guide users when updating axis vectors or extending visualizations with new variables, since they can reveal poor choices of axis vectors. The optimal axes can also be included in nonlinear plots. In particular, we show how they can be used within RadViz to assess the quality of a variable ordering. The in-depth analysis carried out is useful for visualization designers developing radial axes techniques, or planning to incorporate axes into other visualization methods.Item Color Nameability Predicts Inference Accuracy in Spatial Visualizations(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Reda, Khairi; Salvi, Amey A.; Gray, Jack; Papka, Michael E.; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonColor encoding is foundational to visualizing quantitative data. Guidelines for colormap design have traditionally emphasized perceptual principles, such as order and uniformity. However, colors also evoke cognitive and linguistic associations whose role in data interpretation remains underexplored. We study how two linguistic factors, name salience and name variation, affect people's ability to draw inferences from spatial visualizations. In two experiments, we found that participants are better at interpreting visualizations when viewing colors with more salient names (e.g., prototypical 'blue', 'yellow', and 'red' over 'teal', 'beige', and 'maroon'). The effect was robust across four visualization types, but was more pronounced in continuous (e.g., smooth geographical maps) than in similar discrete representations (e.g., choropleths). Participants' accuracy also improved as the number of nameable colors increased, although the latter had a less robust effect. Our findings suggest that color nameability is an important design consideration for quantitative colormaps, and may even outweigh traditional perceptual metrics. In particular, we found that the linguistic associations of color are a better predictor of performance than the perceptual properties of those colors. We discuss the implications and outline research opportunities. The data and materials for this study are available at https://osf.io/asb7nItem TourVis: Narrative Visualization of Multi-Stage Bicycle Races(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Díaz, Jose; Fort, Marta; Vázquez, Pere-Pau; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonThere are many multiple-stage racing competitions in various sports such as swimming, running, or cycling. The wide availability of affordable tracking devices facilitates monitoring the position along with the race of all participants, even for non-professional contests. Getting real-time information of contenders is useful but also unleashes the possibility of creating more complex visualization systems that ease the understanding of the behavior of all participants during a simple stage or throughout the whole competition. In this paper we focus on bicycle races, which are highly popular, especially in Europe, being the Tour de France its greatest exponent. Current visualizations from TV broadcasting or real-time tracking websites are useful to understand the current stage status, up to a certain extent. Unfortunately, still no current system exists that visualizes a whole multi-stage contest in such a way that users can interactively explore the relevant events of a single stage (e.g. breakaways, groups, virtual leadership: : :), as well as the full competition. In this paper, we present an interactive system that is useful both for aficionados and professionals to visually analyze the development of multi-stage cycling competitions.Item Implicit Modeling of Patient-Specific Aortic Dissections with Elliptic Fourier Descriptors(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Mistelbauer, Gabriel; Rössl, Christian; Bäumler, Kathrin; Preim, Bernhard; Fleischmann, Dominik; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonAortic dissection is a life-threatening vascular disease characterized by abrupt formation of a new flow channel (false lumen) within the aortic wall. Survivors of the acute phase remain at high risk for late complications, such as aneurysm formation, rupture, and death. Morphologic features of aortic dissection determine not only treatment strategies in the acute phase (surgical vs. endovascular vs. medical), but also modulate the hemodynamics in the false lumen, ultimately responsible for late complications. Accurate description of the true and false lumen, any communications across the dissection membrane separating the two lumina, and blood supply from each lumen to aortic branch vessels is critical for risk prediction. Patient-specific surface representations are also a prerequisite for hemodynamic simulations, but currently require time-consuming manual segmentation of CT data. We present an aortic dissection cross-sectional model that captures the varying aortic anatomy, allowing for reliable measurements and creation of high-quality surface representations. In contrast to the traditional spline-based cross-sectional model, we employ elliptic Fourier descriptors, which allows users to control the accuracy of the cross-sectional contour of a flow channel. We demonstrate (i) how our approach can solve the requirements for generating surface and wall representations of the flow channels, (ii) how any number of communications between flow channels can be specified in a consistent manner, and (iii) how well branches connected to the respective flow channels are handled. Finally, we discuss how our approach is a step forward to an automated generation of surface models for aortic dissections from raw 3D imaging segmentation masks.Item Sunspot Plots: Model-based Structure Enhancement for Dense Scatter Plots(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Trautner, Thomas; Bolte, Fabian; Stoppel, Sergej; Bruckner, Stefan; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaScatter plots are a powerful and well-established technique for visualizing the relationships between two variables as a collection of discrete points. However, especially when dealing with large and dense data, scatter plots often exhibit problems such as overplotting, making the data interpretation arduous. Density plots are able to overcome these limitations in highly populated regions, but fail to provide accurate information of individual data points. This is particularly problematic in sparse regions where the density estimate may not provide a good representation of the underlying data. In this paper, we present sunspot plots, a visualization technique that communicates dense data as a continuous data distribution, while preserving the discrete nature of data samples in sparsely populated areas. We furthermore demonstrate the advantages of our approach on typical failure cases of scatter plots within synthetic and real-world data sets and validate its effectiveness in a user study.Item Co-creating Visualizations: A First Evaluation with Social Science Researchers(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Molina León, Gabriela; Breiter, Andreas; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaCo-creation is a design method where designers and domain experts work together to develop a product. In this paper, we present and evaluate the use of co-creation to design a visual information system with social science researchers in order to explore and analyze their data. Co-creation proposes involving the future users in the design process to ensure that they play a critical role in the design, and to increase the chances of long-term adoption. We evaluated the co-creation process through surveys, interviews and a user study. According to the participants' feedback, they felt listened to through co-creation, and considered the methodology helpful to develop visualizations that support their research in the near future. However, participation was far from perfect, particularly early career researchers showed limited interest in participating because they did not see the process as beneficial for their research publication goals. We summarize benefits and limitations of co-creation, together with our recommendations, as lessons learned.Item Curve Complexity Heuristic KD-trees for Neighborhood-based Exploration of 3D Curves(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lu, Yucheng; Cheng, Luyu; Isenberg, Tobias; Fu, Chi-Wing; Chen, Guoning; Liu, Hui; Deussen, Oliver; Wang, Yunhai; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanWe introduce the curve complexity heuristic (CCH), a KD-tree construction strategy for 3D curves, which enables interactive exploration of neighborhoods in dense and large line datasets. It can be applied to searches of k-nearest curves (KNC) as well as radius-nearest curves (RNC). The CCH KD-tree construction consists of two steps: (i) 3D curve decomposition that takes into account curve complexity and (ii) KD-tree construction, which involves a novel splitting and early termination strategy. The obtained KD-tree allows us to improve the speed of existing neighborhood search approaches by at least an order of magnitude (i. e., 28× for KNC and 12× for RNC with 98% accuracy) by considering local curve complexity. We validate this performance with a quantitative evaluation of the quality of search results and computation time. Also, we demonstrate the usefulness of our approach for supporting various applications such as interactive line queries, line opacity optimization, and line abstraction.Item SEEVis: A Smart Emergency Evacuation Plan Visualization System with Data-Driven Shot Designs(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Li, Quan; Liu, Yingjie J.; Chen, Li; Yang, Xingchao C.; Peng, Yi; Yuan, Xiaoru R.; Wijerathne, Maddegedara Lalith Lakshman; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaDespite the significance of tracking human mobility dynamics in a large-scale earthquake evacuation for an effective first response and disaster relief, the general understanding of evacuation behaviors remains limited. Numerous individual movement trajectories, disaster damages of civil engineering, associated heterogeneous data attributes, as well as complex urban environment all obscure disaster evacuation analysis. Although visualization methods have demonstrated promising performance in emergency evacuation analysis, they cannot effectively identify and deliver the major features like speed or density, as well as the resulting evacuation events like congestion or turn-back. In this study, we propose a shot design approach to generate customized and narrative animations to track different evacuation features with different exploration purposes of users. Particularly, an intuitive scene feature graph that identifies the most dominating evacuation events is first constructed based on user-specific regions or their tracking purposes on a certain feature. An optimal camera route, i.e., a storyboard is then calculated based on the previous user-specific regions or features. For different evacuation events along this route, we employ the corresponding shot design to reveal the underlying feature evolution and its correlation with the environment. Several case studies confirm the efficacy of our system. The feedback from experts and users with different backgrounds suggests that our approach indeed helps them better embrace a comprehensive understanding of the earthquake evacuation.Item Many At Once: Capturing Intentions to Create And Use Many Views At Once In Large Display Environments(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Aurisano, Jillian; Kumar, Abhinav; Alsaiari, Abeer; Eugenio, Barbara Di; Johnson, Andrew E.; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaThis paper describes results from an observational, exploratory study of visual data exploration in a large, multi-view, flexible canvas environment. Participants were provided with a set of data exploration sub-tasks associated with a local crime dataset and were instructed to pose questions to a remote mediator who would respond by generating and organizing visualizations on the large display. We observed that participants frequently posed requests to cast a net around one or several subsets of the data or a set of data attributes. They accomplished this directly and by utilizing existing views in unique ways, including by requesting to copy and pivot a group of views collectively and posing a set of parallel requests on target views expressed in one command. These observed actions depart from multi-view flexible canvas environments that typically provide interfaces in support of generating one view at a time or actions that operate on one view at a time. We describe how participants used these 'cast-a-net' requests for tasks that spanned more than one view and describe design considerations for multi-view environments that would support the observed multi-view generation actions.