This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combines knowledge from different fields, is tailored to suit diverse audiences and contexts, and frequently incorporates tacit knowledge. This complex nature leads to a series of interrelated challenges for data visualization education. Driven by a lack of consolidated knowledge, overview, and orientation for visualization education, the 21 authors of this paper-educators and researchers in data visualization-identify and describe 19 challenges informed by our collective practical experience. We organize these challenges around seven themes People, Goals & Assessment, Environment, Motivation, Methods, Materials, and Change . Across these themes, we formulate 43 research questions to address these challenges. As part of our call to action, we then conclude with 5 cross-cutting opportunities and respective action items: embrace DIVERSITY+INCLUSION, build COMMUNITIES, conduct RESEARCH, act AGILE, and relish RESPONSIBILITY. We aim to inspire researchers, educators and learners to drive visualization education forward and discuss why, how, who and where we educate, as we learn to use visualization to address challenges across many scales and many domains in a rapidly changing world: viseducationchallenges.github.io.
28 February 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
In 2014, more than 10 million people in the US were affected by an ambulatory disability. Thus, gait rehabilitation is a crucial part of health care systems. The quantification of human locomotion enables clinicians to describe and analyze a patient's gait performance in detail and allows them to base clinical decisions on objective data. These assessments generate a vast amount of complex data which need to be interpreted in a short time period. We conducted a design study in cooperation with gait analysis experts to develop a novel Knowledge-Assisted Visual Analytics solution for clinical Gait analysis (KAVAGait). KAVAGait allows the clinician to store and inspect complex data derived during clinical gait analysis. The system incorporates innovative and interactive visual interface concepts, which were developed based on the needs of clinicians. Additionally, an explicit knowledge store (EKS) allows externalization and storage of implicit knowledge from clinicians. It makes this information available for others, supporting the process of data inspection and clinical decision making. We validated our system by conducting expert reviews, a user study, and a case study. Results suggest that KAVAGait is able to support a clinician during clinical practice by visualizing complex gait data and providing knowledge of other clinicians.
IT-security experts engage in behavior-based malware analysis in order to learn about previously unknown samples of malicious software (malware) or malware families. For this, they need to find and categorize suspicious patterns from large collections of execution traces. Currently available systems do not meet the analysts' needs described as: visual access suitable for complex data structures, visual representations appropriate for IT-security experts, provide work flow-specific interaction techniques, and the ability to externalize knowledge in the form of rules to ease analysis and for sharing with colleagues. To close this gap, we designed and developed KAMAS, a knowledge-assisted visualization system for behavior-based malware analysis. KAMAS supports malware analysts with visual analytics and knowledge externalization methods for the analysis process. The paper at hand is a design study that describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of the prototype. We report on the validation of KAMAS by expert reviews, a user study with domain experts, and focus group meetings with analysts from industry. Additionally, we reflect the gained insights of the design study and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the applied visualization methods.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
The research communities studying visualization and sonification for data display and analysis share exceptionally similar goals, essentially making data of any kind interpretable to humans. One community does so by using visual representations of data, and the other community employs auditory (non‐speech) representations of data. While the two communities have a lot in common, they developed mostly in parallel over the course of the last few decades. With this STAR, we discuss a collection of work that bridges the borders of the two communities, hence a collection of work that aims to integrate the two techniques into one form of audiovisual display, which we argue to be “more than the sum of the two.” We introduce and motivate a classification system applicable to such audiovisual displays and categorize a corpus of 57 academic publications that appeared between 2011 and 2023 in categories such as reading level, dataset type, or evaluation system, to mention a few. The corpus also enables a meta‐analysis of the field, including regularly occurring design patterns such as type of visualization and sonification techniques, or the use of visual and auditory channels, showing an overall diverse field with different designs. An analysis of a co‐author network of the field shows individual teams without many interconnections. The body of work covered in this STAR also relates to three adjacent topics: audiovisual monitoring, accessibility, and audiovisual data art. These three topics are discussed individually in addition to the systematically conducted part of this research. The findings of this report may be used by researchers from both fields to understand the potentials and challenges of such integrated designs while hopefully inspiring them to collaborate with experts from the respective other field.