Jen Rogers

Jen Rogers, Derya Akbaba, James Scott-Brown et al.

Decades of advocacy for reproducibility and replication have advanced open, transparent practices in the sciences. However, traditional notions of reproducibility fit poorly with design-oriented visualization research, where insights emerge through subjective, situated, and iterative work. So how can we ensure rigor and transparency in processes that are inherently unreproducible? To introduce transparency in design-oriented research, we propose to focus on traceability: surfacing the origin and development of research contributions based on rich sets of artifacts documenting the design process. We investigated traceability through a collaborative autoethnographic reflection that builds on several years of work exploring ways to make design-oriented research transparent. This exploration includes an experiment to build a tool to support traceability, which we called tRRRacer. The tRRRacer tool provided a testbed for us to operationalize the three tenets of a traceable process: (1) Record abundant, annotated artifacts representative of research activities; (2) Report curated research threads that articulate rationale and evolution of the process, allowing others to (3) Read via interfaces that help retrace claims and assess plausibility. Reflecting on our experiences, we contribute a theorization of traceability and reflections on how we might support it.

Jen Rogers, Austin H. Patton, Luke Harmon et al.

Design study is an established approach of conducting problem-driven visualization research. The academic visualizationcommunity has produced a large body of work for reporting on design studies, informed by a handful of theoretical frameworks, andapplied to a broad range of application areas. The result is an abundance of reported insights into visualization design, with anemphasis on novel visualization techniques and systems as the primary contribution of these studies. In recent work we proposeda new, interpretivist perspective on design study and six companion criteria for rigor that highlight the opportunities for researchersto contribute knowledge that extends beyond visualization idioms and software. In this work we conducted a year-long collaborationwith evolutionary biologists to develop an interactive tool for visual exploration of multivariate datasets and phylogenetic trees. Duringthis design study we experimented with methods to support three of the rigor criteria:ABUNDANT,REFLEXIVE, andTRANSPARENT. As aresult we contribute two novel visualization techniques for the analysis of multivariate phylogenetic datasets, three methodologicalrecommendations for conducting design studies drawn from reflections over our process of experimentation, and two writing devices forreporting interpretivist design study. We offer this work as an example for implementing the rigor criteria to produce a diverse range ofknowledge contributions.