Ownership relationships of early printed books from the 15th century reveal complex patterns of distribution and possession, offering valuable insights for historical research. This paper presents OwnershipTracker, a visual analytics application developed to explore and trace these relationships using data from the Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) database. OwnershipTracker integrates bibliographic records, copy-specific data, and book provenance and ownership details, enabling users to uncover intricate ownership sequences over time. The application combines several visualization techniques, including network graphs to map connections between owners, timelines for temporal analysis, chord diagrams to quantify transfer patterns, and a distinctive, collaboratively designed spiderweb-like diagram highlighting converging and dispersing ownership transfers through specific owners. Developed iteratively with input from historical book researchers, the application underwent multiple refinements to align with domain research requirements. A summative evaluation with domain experts showcased the tool's ability to address the defined requirements and tasks. The final version of OwnershipTracker is deployed and accessible at: https://booktracker.nms.kcl.ac.uk/ownership.

Visualization design study is a widely adopted approach for developing tailored visual solutions to domain-specific problems through close interdisciplinary collaboration. While the visualization community has proposed generalizable frameworks, there is a growing need for domain-aware methodologies that address discipline-specific challenges and refine design study practices. To investigate how domain characteristics and collaborator roles influence the design study process, we conducted interviews with 15 experts, including domain specialists from the humanities, arts, applied sciences, and artificial intelligence, as well as visualization researchers and developers, with direct experience in design studies. Our findings reveal tensions and opportunities that arise from differing expectations, communication styles, and levels of engagement among collaborators at various stages of the design process, including problem formulation, co-design, and evaluation. We highlight how domain-specific norms and role dynamics shape collaboration and influence the trajectory of visualization projects. Based on these insights, we offer practical considerations to help visualization researchers anticipate domain-specific challenges, foster mutual understanding, and adapt their methods accordingly. Our study contributes to ongoing efforts to support more context-sensitive, sustainable, and inclusive design study practices across diverse application domains.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) applications in artistic and creative domains have gained substantial attention of late. These intelligent interactive systems, shaped by innovations in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs), are materially impacting digital creative domains. While initial work to understand this space has highlighted new models and architectures, we lack a holistic view of how interactive GenAI systems are designed for user interactions across various artistic and creative domains. In this paper, we present a systematic review of interactive GenAI system designs for art and creativity in the HCI literature (N = 189), and a detailed taxonomy of interaction paradigms with design components. We shed light on the communities of design focus and decompose the system interaction designs, mapping these characteristics to creative domains, user interaction patterns, GenAI technologies, detailing under-represented spaces, and future directions of designing interactions for GenAI creativity.

Visualizing event timelines for collaborative text writing is an important application for navigating and understanding such data, as time passes and the size and complexity of both text and timeline increase. They are often employed by applications such as code repositories and collaborative text editors. In this article, we present a visualization tool to explore historical records of writing of legislative texts, which were discussed and voted on by an assembly of representatives. Our visualization focuses on event timelines from text documents that involve multiple people and different topics, allowing for observation of different proposed versions of said text or tracking data provenance of given text sections, while highlighting the connections between all elements involved. We also describe the process of designing such a tool alongside domain experts, with three steps of evaluation being conducted to verify the effectiveness of our design.

This article presents a review and analysis of evaluation practices within the visualization and visual analytics (VIS) domain, with a focus on domain application work accepted at the IEEE VIS conference from 2018 to 2022. Through the analysis of 140 pertinent article, we establish a detailed classification principle for evaluation practices, using the Who, When, What, and How indicators. This principle covers facets such as analysis methods, targets, scenarios, participant expertise, and stages of occurrence. By systematically categorizing the application domains presented in these works, we apply our established classification principle to discern and categorize the evaluation practices within them, identifying the prevailing characteristics and trends. The article explores the variety of evaluation methods employed across different application domains and observes the distinctions in their usage. In conclusion, we provide insights and highlight concerns for conducting evaluations in upcoming domain application research. Our findings are intended to inform and guide subsequent studies in a similar context.

Abstract In natural language processing (NLP), text classification tasks are increasingly fine‐grained, as datasets are fragmented into a larger number of classes that are more difficult to differentiate from one another. As a consequence, the semantic structures of datasets have become more complex, and model decisions more difficult to explain. Existing tools, suited for coarse‐grained classification, falter under these additional challenges. In response to this gap, we worked closely with NLP domain experts in an iterative design‐and‐evaluation process to characterize and tackle the growing requirements in their workflow of developing fine‐grained text classification models. The result of this collaboration is the development of SemLa, a novel Visual Analytics system tailored for 1) dissecting complex semantic structures in a dataset when it is spatialized in model embedding space, and 2) visualizing fine‐grained nuances in the meaning of text samples to faithfully explain model reasoning. This paper details the iterative design study and the resulting innovations featured in SemLa. The final design allows contrastive analysis at different levels by unearthing lexical and conceptual patterns including biases and artifacts in data. Expert feedback on our final design and case studies confirm that SemLa is a useful tool for supporting model validation and debugging as well as data annotation.

The circulation of historical books has always been an area of interest for historians. However, the data used to represent the journey of a book across different places and times can be difficult for domain experts to digest due to buried geographical and chronological features within text-based presentations. This situation provides an opportunity for collaboration between visualization researchers and historians. This paper describes a design study where a variant of the Nine-Stage Framework [46] was employed to develop a Visual Analytics (VA) tool called DanteExploreVis. This tool was designed to aid domain experts in exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data from multiple perspectives. We discuss the design choices made and how each panel in the interface meets the domain requirements. We also present the results of a qualitative evaluation conducted with domain experts. The main contributions of this paper include: 1) the development of a VA tool to support domain experts in exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data; 2) a comprehensive documentation of the iterative design, development, and evaluation process following the variant Nine-Stage Framework; 3) a summary of the insights gained and lessons learned from this design study in the context of the humanities field; and 4) reflections on how our approach could be applied in a more generalizable way.

Abstract Historical records from democratic processes and negotiation of constitutional texts are a complex type of data to navigate due to the many different elements that are constantly interacting with one another: people, timelines, different proposed documents, changes to such documents, and voting to approve or reject those changes. In particular, voting records can offer various insights about relationships between people of note in that historical context, such as alliances that can form and dissolve over time and people with unusual behavior. In this paper, we present a toolset developed to aid users in exploring relationships in voting records from a particular domain of constitutional conventions. The toolset consists of two elements: a dataset visualizer, which shows the entire timeline of a convention and allows users to investigate relationships at different moments in time via dimensionality reduction, and a person visualizer, which shows details of a given person's activity in that convention to aid in understanding the behavior observed in the dataset visualizer. We discuss our design choices and how each tool in those elements works towards our goals, and how they were perceived in an evaluation conducted with domain experts.