Md Dilshadur Rahman

Md Dilshadur Rahman, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, Bhavana Doppalapudi et al.

Annotations play a vital role in highlighting critical aspects of visualizations, aiding in data externalization and exploration, collaborative sensemaking, and visual storytelling. However, despite their widespread use, we identified a lack of a design space for common practices for annotations. In this paper, we evaluated over 1,800 static annotated charts to understand how people annotate visualizations in practice. Through qualitative coding of these diverse real-world annotated charts, we explored three primary aspects of annotation usage patterns: analytic purposes for chart annotations (e.g., present, identify, summarize, or compare data features), mechanisms for chart annotations (e.g., types and combinations of annotations used, frequency of different annotation types across chart types, etc.), and the data source used to generate the annotations. We then synthesized our findings into a design space of annotations, highlighting key design choices for chart annotations. We presented three case studies illustrating our design space as a practical framework for chart annotations to enhance the communication of visualization insights. All supplemental materials are available at {https://shorturl.at/bAGM1}.

Md Dilshadur Rahman, Bhavana Doppalapudi, Ghulam Jilani Quadri et al.

We present a comprehensive survey on the use of annotations in information visualizations, highlighting their crucial role in improving audience understanding and engagement with visual data. Our investigation encompasses empirical studies on annotations, showcasing their impact on user engagement, interaction, comprehension, and memorability across various contexts. We also study the existing tools and techniques for creating annotations and their diverse applications, enhancing the understanding of both practical and theoretical aspects of annotations in data visualization. Additionally, we identify existing research gaps and propose potential future research directions, making our survey a valuable resource for researchers, visualization designers, and practitioners by providing a thorough understanding of the application of annotations in visualization.

S M Raihanul Alam, Md Dilshadur Rahman, Md Naimul Hoque

Visualizing narratives is useful to writers to reflect on unfinished drafts and identify unintentional biases and inconsistencies. Literary scholars can use the visualizations to identify nuanced patterns and literary styles from written text. Current narrative visualization is limited to representing character and location co-occurrences in a timeline, omitting important and complex narrative components such as focalization, causality, and speech. This paper aims to capture and visualize underexplored, complex narrative components as a basis for narrative visualization. As a starting point, we propose a new narrative visualization, named FocalLens, that uses focalization, the component that establishes who sees or perceives the events in a narrative, for representing the narrative. We provide the theoretical foundation of focalization and describe various types and facets of focalization. The details are incorporated in the novel visualization that captures how different characters perceive an event, who directly participate in an event, who indirectly observe the event, and who narrate the event. We also developed a tool that provides fluid interaction between the text and the proposed visualization. The tool was evaluated with four writers and scholars in a qualitative study, where writers analyzed their draft stories and scholars analyzed well-known stories. The findings suggest the tool added a new dimension to the workflow for writers and scholars, an analytical lens that is not available otherwise. We conclude by identifying design implications and future directions.

Md Dilshadur Rahman, Devin Lange, Ghulam Jilani Quadri et al.

Annotation is a central mechanism in visualization design that enables people to communicate key insights. Prior research has provided essential accounts of the visual forms annotations take, but less attention has been paid to the decisions behind them. This paper examines how annotations are designed in practice and how educators reflect on those practices. We conducted a two-phase qualitative study: interviews with ten practitioners from diverse backgrounds revealed the heuristics they draw on when creating annotations, and interviews with seven visualization educators offered complementary perspectives situated within broader concerns of clarity, guidance, and viewer agency. These studies provide a systematic account of annotation design knowledge in professional settings, highlighting the considerations, trade-offs, and contextual judgments that shape the use of annotations. By making this tacit expertise explicit, our work complements prior form-focused studies, strengthens understanding of annotation as a design activity, and points to opportunities for improved tool and guideline support.