Alejandro Benito-Santos

Mr. Alejandro Benito-Santos

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

11Years (2016-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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21 November 2016 in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
ALAntonio G. Losada
Antonio G. Losada
Roberto TheronRoberto Theron
Roberto Theron
ABAlejandro Benito-Santos
Alejandro Benito-Santos
The amount of data available in the sports field is difficult for coaches, analysts, and players to comprehend using classic analytics methods. Thus, new methods are necessary to help users break down that information and analyze it at a deeper level. The BKViz visual analytics system focuses on individual basketball games using classic and novel methods to reveal how players perform together and as individuals. The information is presented in interactive visualizations that allow immediate user feedback.

14 February 2020 in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
ABAlejandro Benito-Santos
Alejandro Benito-Santos
Roberto TheronRoberto Theron
Roberto Theron
The newly rediscovered frontier between data visualization and the digital humanities has proven to be an exciting field of experimentation for scholars from both disciplines. This fruitful collaboration is attracting researchers from other areas of science who may be willing to create visual analysis tools that promote humanities research in its many forms. However, as the collaboration grows in complexity, it may become intimidating for these scholars to get engaged in the discipline. To facilitate this task, we have built an introduction to visualization for the digital humanities that sits on a data-driven stance adopted by the authors. In order to construct a dataset representative of the discipline, we analyze citations from on a core corpus on 300 publications in visualization for the humanities obtained from recent editions of the InfoVis Vis4DH workshop, the ADHO Digital Humanities Conference, and the specialized DH journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ). From here, we extract referenced works and analyze more than 1,900 publications in search of citation patterns, prominent authors in the field, and other interesting insights. Finally, following the path set by other researchers in the visualization and HCI communities, we analyze paper keywords to identify significant themes and research opportunities in the field.

18 July 2019 in IEEE Access
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
ABAlejandro Benito-Santos
Alejandro Benito-Santos
Roberto TheronRoberto Theron
Roberto Theron
Nowadays, scholars dedicate a substantial amount of their work to the querying and browsing of increasingly large collections of research papers on the Internet. In parallel, the recent surge of novel interdisciplinary approaches in science requires scholars to acquire competencies in new fields for which they may lack the necessary vocabulary to formulate adequate queries. This problem, together with the issue of information overload, poses new challenges in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and visualization design that call for a rapid response from the scientific community. In this respect, we report on a novel visualization scheme that enables the exploration of research paper collections via the analysis of semantic proximity relationships found in author-assigned keywords. Our proposal replaces traditional string queries with a bag-of-words (BoW) extracted from a user-generated auxiliary corpus that captures the intentionality of the research. Continuing along the lines established by other authors in the fields of literature-based discovery (LBD), NLP, and visual analytics (VA), we combine novel advances in the fields of NLP with visual network analysis techniques to offer scholars a perspective of the target corpus that better fits their research interests. To highlight the advantages of our proposal, we conduct two experiments employing a collection of visualization research papers and an auxiliary cross-domain BoW. Here, we showcase how our visualization can be used to maximize the effectiveness of a browsing session by enhancing the language acquisition task, which allows for effectively extracting knowledge that is in line with the users' previous expectations.

21 October 2021 in Information
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ABAlejandro Benito-Santos
Alejandro Benito-Santos
MDMichelle Doran
Michelle Doran
ARAleyda Rocha
Aleyda Rocha
Eveline Wandl-VogtEveline Wandl-Vogt
Eveline Wandl-Vogt
JEJennifer Edmond
Jennifer Edmond
Roberto TheronRoberto Theron
Roberto Theron
The capture, modelling and visualisation of uncertainty has become a hot topic in many areas of science, such as the digital humanities (DH). Fuelled by critical voices among the DH community, DH scholars are becoming more aware of the intrinsic advantages that incorporating the notion of uncertainty into their workflows may bring. Additionally, the increasing availability of ubiquitous, web-based technologies has given rise to many collaborative tools that aim to support DH scholars in performing remote work alongside distant peers from other parts of the world. In this context, this paper describes two user studies seeking to evaluate a taxonomy of textual uncertainty aimed at enabling remote collaborations on digital humanities (DH) research objects in a digital medium. Our study focuses on the task of free annotation of uncertainty in texts in two different scenarios, seeking to establish the requirements of the underlying data and uncertainty models that would be needed to implement a hypothetical collaborative annotation system (CAS) that uses information visualisation and visual analytics techniques to leverage the cognitive effort implied by these tasks. To identify user needs and other requirements, we held two user-driven design experiences with DH experts and lay users, focusing on the annotation of uncertainty in historical recipes and literary texts. The lessons learned from these experiments are gathered in a series of insights and observations on how these different user groups collaborated to adapt an uncertainty taxonomy to solve the proposed exercises. Furthermore, we extract a series of recommendations and future lines of work that we share with the community in an attempt to establish a common agenda of DH research that focuses on collaboration around the idea of uncertainty.

10 August 2019 in Informatics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Roberto TheronRoberto Theron
Roberto Theron
ABAlejandro Benito-Santos
Alejandro Benito-Santos
RVRodrigo Santamaría Vicente
Rodrigo Santamaría Vicente
AGAntonio Losada Gómez
Antonio Losada Gómez
As visualization becomes widespread in a broad range of cross-disciplinary academic domains, such as the digital humanities (DH), critical voices have been raised on the perils of neglecting the uncertain character of data in the visualization design process. Visualizations that, purposely or not, obscure or remove uncertainty in its different forms from the scholars’ vision may negatively affect the manner in which humanities scholars regard computational methods as useful tools in their daily work. In this paper, we address the issue of uncertainty representation in the context of the humanities from a theoretical perspective, in an attempt to provide the foundations of a framework that allows for the construction of ecological interface designs which are able to expose the computational power of the algorithms at play while, at the same time, respecting the particularities and needs of humanistic research. To this end, we review past uncertainty taxonomies in other domains typically related to the humanities and visualization, such as cartography and GIScience. From this review, we select an uncertainty taxonomy related to the humanities that we link to recent research in visualization for the DH. Finally, we bring a novel analytics method developed by other authors (Progressive Visual Analytics) into question, which we argue can be a good candidate to resolve the aforementioned difficulties in DH practice.

23 April 2021 in Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
ABAlejandro Benito-Santos
Alejandro Benito-Santos
ADAmelie Dorn
Amelie Dorn
AGAntonio G. Losada Gómez
Antonio G. Losada Gómez
TPThomas Palfinger
Thomas Palfinger
Roberto TheronRoberto Theron
Roberto Theron
Eveline Wandl-VogtEveline Wandl-Vogt
Eveline Wandl-Vogt
This article reports on the experience of co-designing an educational video game aimed at promoting good dietary habits in youngsters and fostering Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). To ensure the quality of the results, we developed a methodology under a social innovation paradigm that enabled the co-creation of the game. The methodology was driven by a series of three workshops, during which we adopted several different gamification strategies to support a Participatory Design (PD) process with the stakeholders, a group of local pre-teen and teen girls at social risk (N = 22). Captured requirements materialized into intermediate prototype evaluations that motivated a progressive refinement of the game.