Outdoor learning experiences, such as field trips, can improve children’s science achievement and engagement, but these experiences are often difficult to deliver without extensive support. Narrative in educational experiences can provide needed structure, while also increasing engagement. We created a narrative-based, mobile application to investigate how to guide young learners in interacting with their local, outdoor environment. In a second variant, we added augmented reality and image classification to explore the value of these features. A study (n = 44) found that participants using our system demonstrated learning gains and found the experience engaging. Our findings identified several major themes, including participant excitement for hands-on interactions with nature, curiosity about the characters, and enthusiasm toward typing their thoughts and observations. We offer a set of design implications for supporting narrative-based, outdoor learning with immersive technology.

Researchers who build creativity support tools (CSTs) define abstractions and software representations that align with user needs to give users the power to accomplish tasks. However, these specifications also structure and limit how users can and should think, act, and express themselves. Thus, tool designers unavoidably exert power over their users by enacting a “normative ground” through their tools. Drawing on interviews with 11 creative practitioners, tool designers, and CST researchers, we offer a definition of empowerment in the context of creative practice, build a preliminary theory of how power relationships manifest in CSTs, and explain why researchers have had trouble addressing these concepts in the past. We re-examine CST literature through a lens of power and argue that mitigating power imbalances at the level of technical design requires enabling users in both vertical movement along levels of abstraction as well as horizontal movement between tools through interoperable representations. A lens of power is one possible orientation that lets us recognize the methodological shifts required towards building “artistic support tools.”

Cable (TV) news reaches millions of US households each day. News stakeholders such as communications researchers, journalists, and media monitoring organizations are interested in the visual content of cable news, especially who is on-screen. Manual analysis, however, is labor intensive and limits the size of prior studies. We conduct a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the faces in a decade of cable news video from the top three US cable news networks (CNN, FOX, and MSNBC), totaling 244,038 hours between January 2010 and July 2019. Our work uses technologies such as automatic face and gender recognition to measure the "screen time" of faces and to enable visual analysis and exploration at scale. Our analysis method gives insight into a broad set of socially relevant topics. For instance, male-presenting faces receive much more screen time than female-presenting faces (2.4x in 2010, 1.9x in 2019). To make our dataset and annotations accessible, we release a public interface at https://tvnews.stanford.edu that allows the general public to write queries and to perform their own analyses.

Inspired by data comics, this paper introduces a novel format for reporting controlled studies in the domain of human-computer interaction (HCI). While many studies in HCI follow similar steps in explaining hypotheses, laying out a study design, and reporting results, many of these decisions are buried in blocks of dense scientific text. We propose leveraging data comics as study reports to provide an open and glanceable view of studies by tightly integrating text and images, illustrating design decisions and key insights visually, resulting in visual narratives that can be compelling to non-scientists and researchers alike. Use cases of data comics study reports range from illustrations for non-scientific audiences to graphical abstracts, study summaries, technical talks, textbooks, teaching, blogs, supplementary submission material, and inclusion in scientific articles. This paper provides examples of data comics study reports alongside a graphical repertoire of examples, embedded in a framework of guidelines for creating comics reports which was iterated upon and evaluated through a series of collaborative design sessions.

The Law of Common Fate from Gestalt psychology states that visual objects moving with the same velocity along parallel trajectories will be perceived by a human observer as grouped. However, the concept of common fate is much broader than mere velocity; in this paper we explore how common fate results from coordinated changes in luminance and size. We present results from a crowdsourced graphical perception study where we asked workers to make perceptual judgments on a series of trials involving four graphical objects under the influence of conflicting static and dynamic visual factors (position, size and luminance) used in conjunction. Our results yield the following rankings for visual grouping: motion > (dynamic luminance, size, luminance); dynamic size > (dynamic luminance, position); and dynamic luminance > size. We also conducted a follow-up experiment to evaluate the three dynamic visual factors in a more ecologically valid setting, using both a Gapminder-like animated scatterplot and a thematic map of election data. The results indicate that in practice the relative grouping strengths of these factors may depend on various parameters including the visualization characteristics and the underlying data. We discuss design implications for animated transitions in data visualization.

Designers are often discouraged from creating data visualizations that omit or distort information, because they can easily be misleading. However, the same representations that could be used to deceive can provide benefits when chosen to appropriately align with user tasks. We present an interaction technique, Perceptual Glimpses, which allows for the transparent presentation of so-called 'deceptive' views of information that are made temporary using quasimodes. When presented using Perceptual Glimpses, message-level exaggeration caused by a truncated axis on a bar chart was reduced under some conditions, but users require guidance to avoid errors, and view presentation order may affect trust. When Perceptual Glimpses was extended to display a range of views that might otherwise be deceptive or difficult to understand if shown out of context, users were able to understand and leverage these transformations to perform a range of low-level tasks. Design recommendations and examples suggest extensions of the technique.