Robert S. Laramee

Jian Chen, Petra Isenberg, Robert S. Laramee et al.

We present and discuss the results of a qualitative analysis of visualization images to derive an image-based typology of visualizations. For each image, we seek to identify its main focus or the essential stimuli. As a result, we derived 10 image-based visualization types. We describe coding decisions we made in the derivation process. The resulting image typology can serve a number of purposes: enabling researchers and practitioners to identify visual design styles, facilitating the categorization of visualization images for the purpose of research and teaching, enabling researchers to study the evolution of the community and its research output over time, and facilitating a discussion of standardization in visualization. In addition, the tool and dataset enable scholars to closely examine the images and how they are published and communicated in our community. osf.io/dxjwt presents a pre-registration and all supplemental materials.

Xiaoxiao Liu, Mohammad Alharbi, Joe Best et al.

Visualization, as a vibrant field for researchers, practitioners, and higher educational institutions, is growing and evolving very rapidly. Tremendous progress has been made since 1987, the year often cited as the beginning of data visualization as a distinct field. As such, the number of visualization resources and the demand for those resources are increasing at a very fast pace. We present a collection of open visualization resources for all those with an interest in interactive data visualization and visual analytics. Because the number of resources is so large, we focus on collections of resources, of which there are already very many ranging from literature collections to collections of practitioner resources. We develop a novel classification of visualization resource collections based on the resource type, e.g. literature-based, web-based, etc. The result is a helpful overview and details-on-demand of many useful resources. The collection offers a valuable jump-start for those seeking out data visualization resources from all backgrounds spanning from beginners such as students to teachers, practitioners, and researchers wishing to create their own advanced or novel visual designs.

Meng Ling, Jian Chen, Torsten Möller et al.

We present document domain randomization (DDR), the first successful transfer of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained only on graphically rendered pseudo-paper pages to real-world document segmentation. DDR renders pseudo-document pages by modeling randomized textual and non-textual contents of interest, with user-defined layout and font styles to support joint learning of fine-grained classes. We demonstrate competitive results using our DDR approach to extract nine document classes from the benchmark CS-150 and papers published in two domains, namely annual meetings of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and IEEE Visualization (VIS). We compare DDR to conditions of style mismatch, fewer or more noisy samples that are more easily obtained in the real world. We show that high-fidelity semantic information is not necessary to label semantic classes but style mismatch between train and test can lower model accuracy. Using smaller training samples had a slightly detrimental effect. Finally, network models still achieved high test accuracy when correct labels are diluted towards confusing labels; this behavior hold across several classes.

Jian Chen, Meng Ling, Rui Li et al.

We present the VIS30K dataset, a collection of 29,689 images that represents 30 years of figures and tables from each track of the IEEE Visualization conference series (Vis, SciVis, InfoVis, VAST). VIS30K's comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature in visualization not only reflects the progress of the field but also enables researchers to study the evolution of the state-of-the-art and to find relevant work based on graphical content. We describe the dataset and our semi-automatic collection process, which couples convolutional neural networks (CNN) with curation. Extracting figures and tables semi-automatically allows us to verify that no images are overlooked or extracted erroneously. To improve quality further, we engaged in a peer-search process for high-quality figures from early IEEE Visualization papers. With the resulting data, we also contribute VISImageNavigator (VIN, visimagenavigator.github.io), a web-based tool that facilitates searching and exploring VIS30K by author names, paper keywords, title and abstract, and years.

M. Chen, A. Abdul-Rahman, D. Archambault et al.

The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling, treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an urgent need to develop and provide visualisation and visual analytics (VIS) capacities to support emergency responses under difficult operational conditions. In this paper, we report the experience of a group of VIS volunteers who have been working in a large research and development consortium and providing VIS support to various observational, analytical, model-developmental and disseminative tasks. In particular, we describe our approaches to the challenges that we have encountered in requirements analysis, data acquisition, visual design, software design, system development, team organisation, and resource planning. By reflecting on our experience, we propose a set of recommendations as the first step towards a methodology for developing and providing rapid VIS capacities to support emergency responses.

Alexandra Diehl, Matthias Kraus, Alfie Abdul-Rahman et al.

Visualization guidelines, if defined properly, are invaluable to both practical applications and the theoretical foundation of visualization. In this paper, we present a collection of research activities for studying visualization guidelines according to Grounded Theory (GT). We used the discourses at VisGuides, which is an online discussion forum for visualization guidelines, as the main data source for enabling data-driven research processes as advocated by the grounded theory methodology. We devised a categorization scheme focusing on observing how visualization guidelines were featured in different threads and posts at VisGuides, and coded all 248 posts between September 27, 2017 (when VisGuides was first launched) and March 13, 2019. To complement manual categorization and coding, we used text analysis and visualization to help reveal patterns that may have been missed by the manual effort and summary statistics. To facilitate theoretical sampling and negative case analysis, we made an in-depth analysis of the 148 posts (with both questions and replies) related to a student assignment of a visualization course. Inspired by two discussion threads at VisGuides, we conducted two controlled empirical studies to collect further data to validate specific visualization guidelines. Through these activities guided by grounded theory, we have obtained some new findings about visualization guidelines.