We conduct an eye tracking study to investigate perception text-embellished narrative visualizations under different task conditions. Study stimuli are data visualizations embellished with text-based elements: annotations, captions, labels, and descriptive text. We consider three common viewing tasks that occur when these types of graphics are viewed: (1) simple observation, (2) active search to answer a query, and (3) information memorization for later recall. The overarching goal is to understand, at a perceptual level, if and how task affects how these visualizations are interacted with. By analyzing collected gaze data and conducting advanced semantic scanpath analysis, we find, at a high level, diverse patterns of gaze behavior: simple observation and information memorization lead to similar optical viewing strategies, while active search significantly diverges, both in regards to which areas of the visualization are focused upon and how often embellishments are interacted with. We discuss study outcomes in the context of embellishing visualizations with text for various usage scenarios.

Group Support Systems provide ways to review and edit shared content during meetings, but typically require participants to explicitly generate the content. Recent advances in speech-to-text conversion and language processing now make it possible to automatically record and review spoken information. We present the iterative design and evaluation of TalkTraces, a real-time visualization that helps teams identify themes in their discussions and obtain a sense of agenda items covered. We use topic modeling to identify themes within the discussions and word embeddings to compute the discussion "relatedness" to items in the meeting agenda. We evaluate TalkTraces iteratively: we first conduct a comparative between-groups study between two teams using TalkTraces and two teams using traditional notes, over four sessions. We translate the findings into changes in the interface, further evaluated by one team over four sessions. Based on our findings, we discuss design implications for real-time displays of discussion content.