Animating metaphoric visualizations brings data to life, enhancing the comprehension of abstract data encodings and fostering deeper engagement. However, creators face significant challenges in designing these animations, such as crafting motions that align semantically with the metaphors, maintaining faithful data representation during animation, and seamlessly integrating interactivity. We propose a human-AI co-creation workflow that facilitates creating animations for SVG-based metaphoric visualizations. Users can initially derive animation clips for data elements from vision-language models (VLMs) and subsequently coordinate their timelines based on entity order, attribute values, spatial layout, or randomness. Our design decisions were informed by a formative study with experienced designers (N=8). We further developed a prototype, DataSway, and conducted a user study (N=14) to evaluate its creativity support and usability. A gallery with seven cases demonstrates its capabilities and applications in web-based hypermedia. We conclude with implications for future research on bespoke data visualization animation.

Rhythm and articulation are essential for expressive guitar performance. Existing tools provide basic beat cues, whereas beginners often struggle to align with these cues when playing complex techniques, such as strumming and muting. Informed by a formative study with five instructors and grounded in embodied learning theories, we present FretFlow, a haptic vest-based tool that simulates common instructional practices to guide learners through physical interactions like tapping. The key to FretFlow is its design space that maps rhythmic and articulation patterns in various playing techniques to distinct haptic patterns, enabling authoring of haptic scores. FretFlow further dynamically adapts haptic intensity based on learners’ real-time performance accuracy, accompanied by multimodal guidance across haptic, visual, and audio channels. We iteratively refined haptic designs across two rounds with 46 participants, followed by a two-week user study with 20 beginners. Results show that FretFlow improves learners’ rhythmic accuracy and expressive performance.

The number of HCI papers on care has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite growing interest in care both as an application domain for technology and as an ethical stance in research and design, our integrated understanding of the concept is limited. It remains unclear how various application areas of care relate to one another, to what extent their underlying assumptions align or contradict, and how they collectively shape HCI discourse on care. To address this, we present a meta-narrative review of 317 SIGCHI papers on care. We first outline the landscape of care in HCI. We then present six paradigmatic framings of care, and a conceptual map that positions these framings in relation to each other, their representative care–tech relations, and the temporal development of the field. We conclude by discussing the implications from the review, as well as gaps in the field and future directions.

Bias in machine learning datasets occurs when certain attributes are unfairly associated, e.g., serious males being mostly linked with law enforcement officers in job-related image datasets. Training models on biased datasets will degrade model performance and lead to fairness issues, particularly for underrepresented groups. Existing bias detection methods mainly focus on explicit biases associated with predefined attributes (e.g., gender and ethnicity) while overlooking implicit biases associated with subtler, dataset-specific attributes (e.g., facial expressions and attire). To address this gap, we present BiasField, an interactive tool that offers a closed-loop workflow for detecting, analyzing, and mitigating bias. Central to BiasField is the adaptive detection of both explicit and implicit biases, a process facilitated by the automatic extraction of the dataset-specific attributes. It then employs a plant-growth metaphor to visualize these biases, enabling structured analysis to identify similar biases and track how they strengthen with additional attributes. Finally, confirmed biases are mitigated through targeted generative data augmentation. A user study, two case studies, and an expert study are conducted to demonstrate its capability to detect, analyze, and mitigate complex biases.

Data validation is a crucial step in data analytics workflows that assesses and ensures the reliability of data flowing into analytical processes. One common approach to data validation involves defining validation rules, which provide explicit constraints and conditions that data must satisfy. However, creating accurate and effective validation rules remains challenging for many practitioners. This challenge stems from the need for practitioners to understand both data structures and their domain-specific semantic relationships. Recent studies have proposed automated approaches to generate validation rules by deriving patterns from data properties. However, these approaches generate rules with limited interpretability and lack support for rule verification and modification, making the rules difficult to understand and adapt. To address these limitations in current validation rule authoring approaches, we present RuleScope, an interactive system for authoring data validation rules through semantic-aware rule generation, visualization, and refinement. RuleScope employs an LLM-based workflow to generate interpretable rules by analyzing data semantics and incorporating domain knowledge. To facilitate rule comprehension, we design a matrix-based visualization that helps users understand rules and analyze validation results. Additionally, RuleScope enables users to interactively refine rules. We evaluate the LLM-based workflow through model evaluation on datasets from different domains and assess RuleScope's usability and effectiveness through two case studies and a user study.

Creating aesthetically pleasing data visualizations remains challenging for users without design expertise or familiarity with visualization tools. To address this gap, we present DataWink, a system that enables users to create custom visualizations by adapting high-quality examples. Our approach combines large multimodal models (LMMs) to extract data encoding from existing SVG-based visualization examples, featuring an intermediate representation of visualizations that bridges primitive SVG and visualization programs. Users may express adaptation goals to a conversational agent and control the visual appearance through widgets generated on demand. With an interactive interface, users can modify both data mappings and visual design elements while maintaining the original visualization's aesthetic quality. To evaluate DataWink, we conduct a user study (N=12) with replication and free-form exploration tasks. As a result, DataWink is recognized for its learnability and effectiveness in personalized authoring tasks. Our results demonstrate the potential of example-driven approaches for democratizing visualization creation.

Understanding the input and output of data wrangling scripts is crucial for various tasks like debugging code and onboarding new data. However, existing research on script understanding primarily focuses on revealing the process of data transformations, lacking the ability to analyze the potential scope, i.e., the space of script inputs and outputs. Meanwhile, constructing input/output space during script analysis is challenging, as the wrangling scripts could be semantically complex and diverse, and the association between different data objects is intricate. To facilitate data workers in understanding the input and output space of wrangling scripts, we summarize ten types of constraints to express table space and build a mapping between data transformations and these constraints to guide the construction of the input/output for individual transformations. Then, we propose a constraint generation model for integrating table constraints across multiple transformations. Based on the model, we develop Ferry, an interactive system that extracts and visualizes the data constraints describing the input and output space of data wrangling scripts, thereby enabling users to grasp the high-level semantics of complex scripts and locate the origins of faulty data transformations. Besides, Ferry provides example input and output data to assist users in interpreting the extracted constraints and checking and resolving the conflicts between these constraints and any uploaded dataset. Ferry's effectiveness and usability are evaluated through two usage scenarios and two case studies, including understanding, debugging, and checking both single and multiple scripts, with and without executable data. Furthermore, an illustrative application is presented to demonstrate Ferry's flexibility.

This paper presents an interactive technique to explain visual patterns in network visualizations to analysts who do not understand these visualizations and who are learning to read them. Learning a visualization requires mastering its visual grammar and decoding information presented through visual marks, graphical encodings, and spatial configurations. To help people learn network visualization designs and extract meaningful information, we introduce the concept of interactive pattern explanation that allows viewers to select an arbitrary area in a visualization, then automatically mines the underlying data patterns, and explains both visual and data patterns present in the viewer's selection. In a qualitative and a quantitative user study with a total of 32 participants, we compare interactive pattern explanations to textual-only and visual-only (cheatsheets) explanations. Our results show that interactive explanations increase learning of i) unfamiliar visualizations, ii) patterns in network science, and iii) the respective network terminology.

This paper defines, analyzes, and discusses the emerging genre of visualization atlases. We currently witness an increase in web-based, data-driven initiatives that call themselves "atlases" while explaining complex, contemporary issues through data and visualizations: climate change, sustainability, AI, or cultural discoveries. To understand this emerging genre and inform their design, study, and authoring support, we conducted a systematic analysis of 33 visualization atlases and semi-structured interviews with eight visualization atlas creators. Based on our results, we contribute (1) a definition of a visualization atlas as a compendium of (web) pages aimed at explaining and supporting exploration of data about a dedicated topic through data, visualizations and narration. (2) a set of design patterns of 8 design dimensions, (3) insights into the atlas creation from interviews and (4) the definition of 5 visualization atlas genres. We found that visualization atlases are unique in the way they combine i) exploratory visualization, ii) narrative elements from data-driven storytelling and iii) structured navigation mechanisms. They target a wide range of audiences with different levels of domain knowledge, acting as tools for study, communication, and discovery. We conclude with a discussion of current design practices and emerging questions around the ethics and potential real-world impact of visualization atlases, aimed to inform the design and study of visualization atlases.

Creating an animated data video with audio narration is a time-consuming and complex task that requires expertise. It involves designing complex animations, turning written scripts into audio narrations, and synchronizing visual changes with the narrations. This paper presents WonderFlow, an interactive authoring tool, that facilitates narration-centric design of animated data videos. WonderFlow allows authors to easily specify semantic links between text and the corresponding chart elements. Then it automatically generates audio narration by leveraging text-to-speech techniques and aligns the narration with an animation. WonderFlow provides a structure-aware animation library designed to ease chart animation creation, enabling authors to apply pre-designed animation effects to common visualization components. Additionally, authors can preview and refine their data videos within the same system, without having to switch between different creation tools. A series of evaluation results confirmed that WonderFlow is easy to use and simplifies the creation of data videos with narration-animation interplay.

Plain tables excel at displaying data details and are widely used in data presentation, often polished to an elaborate appearance for readability in many scenarios. However, existing authoring tools fail to provide both flexible and efficient support for altering the table layout and styles, motivating us to develop an intuitive and swift tool for table prototyping. To this end, we contribute Table Illustrator, a table authoring system taking a novel visual metaphor, puzzle, as the primary interaction unit. Through combinations and configurations on puzzles, the system enables rapid table construction and supports a diverse range of table layouts and styles. The tool design is informed by practical challenges and requirements from interviews with 10 table practitioners and a structured design space based on an analysis of over 2,500 real-world tables. User studies showed that Table Illustrator achieved comparable performance to Microsoft Excel while reducing users’ completion time and perceived workload.

Tables are a ubiquitous data format for insight communication. However, transforming data into consumable tabular views remains a challenging and time-consuming task. To lower the barrier of such a task, research efforts have been devoted to developing interactive approaches for data transformation, but many approaches still presume that their users have considerable knowledge of various data transformation concepts and functions. In this study, we leverage natural language (NL) as the primary interaction modality to improve the accessibility of average users to performing complex data transformation and facilitate intuitive table generation and editing. Designing an NL-driven data transformation approach introduces two challenges: 1) NL-driven synthesis of interpretable pipelines and 2) incremental refinement of synthesized tables. To address these challenges, we present NL2Rigel, an interactive tool that assists users in synthesizing and improving tables from semi-structured text with NL instructions. Based on a large language model and prompting techniques, NL2Rigel can interpret the given NL instructions into a table synthesis pipeline corresponding to Rigel specifications, a declarative language for tabular data transformation. An intuitive interface is designed to visualize the synthesis pipeline and the generated tables, helping users understand the transformation process and refine the results efficiently with targeted NL instructions. The comprehensiveness of NL2Rigel is demonstrated with an example gallery, and we further confirmed NL2Rigel's usability with a comparative user study by showing that the task completion time with NL2Rigel is significantly shorter than that with the original version of Rigel with comparable completion rates.

We propose emordle, a conceptual design that animates wordles (compact word clouds) to deliver their emotional context to audiences. To inform the design, we first reviewed online examples of animated texts and animated wordles, and summarized strategies for injecting emotion into the animations. We introduced a composite approach that extends an existing animation scheme for one word to multiple words in a wordle with two global factors: the randomness of text animation (entropy) and the animation speed (speed). To create an emordle, general users can choose one predefined animated scheme that matches the intended emotion class and fine-tune the emotion intensity with the two parameters. We designed proof-of-concept emordle examples for four basic emotion classes, namely happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. We conducted two controlled crowdsourcing studies to evaluate our approach. The first study confirmed that people generally agreed on the conveyed emotions from well-crafted animations, and the second one demonstrated that our identified factors helped fine-tune the extent of the emotion delivered. We also invited general users to create their own emordles based on our proposed framework. Through this user study, we confirmed the effectiveness of the approach. We concluded with implications for future research opportunities of supporting emotion expression in visualizations.

We present Rigel, an interactive system for rapid transformation of tabular data. Rigel implements a new declarative mapping approach that formulates the data transformation procedure as direct mappings from data to the row, column, and cell channels of the target table. To construct such mappings, Rigel allows users to directly drag data attributes from input data to these three channels and indirectly drag or type data values in a spreadsheet, and possible mappings that do not contradict these interactions are recommended to achieve efficient and straightforward data transformation. The recommended mappings are generated by enumerating and composing data variables based on the row, column, and cell channels, thereby revealing the possibility of alternative tabular forms and facilitating open-ended exploration in many data transformation scenarios, such as designing tables for presentation. In contrast to existing systems that transform data by composing operations (like transposing and pivoting), Rigel requires less prior knowledge on these operations, and constructing tables from the channels is more efficient and results in less ambiguity than generating operation sequences as done by the traditional by-example approaches. User study results demonstrated that Rigel is significantly less demanding in terms of time and interactions and suits more scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art by-example approach. A gallery of diverse transformation cases is also presented to show the potential of Rigel's expressiveness.

Images in visualization publications contain rich information, e.g., novel visualization designs and implicit design patterns of visualizations. A systematic collection of these images can contribute to the community in many aspects, such as literature analysis and automated tasks for visualization. In this paper, we build and make public a dataset, VisImages, which collects 12,267 images with captions from 1,397 papers in IEEE InfoVis and VAST. Built upon a comprehensive visualization taxonomy, the dataset includes 35,096 visualizations and their bounding boxes in the images. We demonstrate the usefulness of VisImages through three use cases: 1) investigating the use of visualizations in the publications with VisImages Explorer, 2) training and benchmarking models for visualization classification, and 3) localizing visualizations in the visual analytics systems automatically.

Glyph-based visualization achieves an impressive graphic design when associated with comprehensive visual metaphors, which help audiences effectively grasp the conveyed information through revealing data semantics. However, creating such metaphoric glyph-based visualization (MGV) is not an easy task, as it requires not only a deep understanding of data but also professional design skills. This paper proposes MetaGlyph, an automatic system for generating MGVs from a spreadsheet. To develop MetaGlyph, we first conduct a qualitative analysis to understand the design of current MGVs from the perspectives of metaphor embodiment and glyph design. Based on the results, we introduce a novel framework for generating MGVs by metaphoric image selection and an MGV construction. Specifically, MetaGlyph automatically selects metaphors with corresponding images from online resources based on the input data semantics. We then integrate a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm that explores the design of an MGV by associating visual elements with data dimensions given the data importance, semantic relevance, and glyph non-overlap. The system also provides editing feedback that allows users to customize the MGVs according to their design preferences. We demonstrate the use of MetaGlyph through a set of examples, one usage scenario, and validate its effectiveness through a series of expert interviews.

In multiple coordinated views (MCVs), visualizations across views update their content in response to users' interactions in other views. Interactive systems provide direct manipulation to create coordination between views, but are restricted to limited types of predefined templates. By contrast, textual specification languages enable flexible coordination but expose technical burden. To bridge the gap, we contribute Nebula, a grammar based on natural language for coordinating visualizations in MCVs. The grammar design is informed by a novel framework based on a systematic review of 176 coordinations from existing theories and applications, which describes coordination by demonstration, i.e., how coordination is performed by users. With the framework, Nebula specification formalizes coordination as a composition of user- and coordination-triggered interactions in origin and destination views, respectively, along with potential data transformation between the interactions. We evaluate Nebula by demonstrating its expressiveness with a gallery of diverse examples and analyzing its usability on cognitive dimensions.

The increased availability of quantitative historical datasets has provided new research opportunities for multiple disciplines in social science. In this article, we work closely with the constructors of a new dataset, CGED-Q (China Government Employee Database-Qing), that records the career trajectories of over 340,000 government officials in the Qing bureaucracy in China from 1760 to 1912. We use these data to study career mobility from a historical perspective and understand social mobility and inequality. However, existing statistical approaches are inadequate for analyzing career mobility in this historical dataset with its fine-grained attributes and long time span, since they are mostly hypothesis-driven and require substantial effort. We propose CareerLens, an interactive visual analytics system for assisting experts in exploring, understanding, and reasoning from historical career data. With CareerLens, experts examine mobility patterns in three levels-of-detail, namely, the macro-level providing a summary of overall mobility, the meso-level extracting latent group mobility patterns, and the micro-level revealing social relationships of individuals. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of CareerLens through two case studies and receive encouraging feedback from follow-up interviews with domain experts.

Visualizations themselves have become a data format. Akin to other data formats such as text and images, visualizations are increasingly created, stored, shared, and (re-)used with artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. In this survey, we probe the underlying vision of formalizing visualizations as an emerging data format and review the recent advance in applying AI techniques to visualization data (AI4VIS). We define visualization data as the digital representations of visualizations in computers and focus on data visualization (e.g., charts and infographics). We build our survey upon a corpus spanning ten different fields in computer science with an eye toward identifying important common interests. Our resulting taxonomy is organized around WHAT is visualization data and its representation, WHY and HOW to apply AI to visualization data. We highlight a set of common tasks that researchers apply to the visualization data and present a detailed discussion of AI approaches developed to accomplish those tasks. Drawing upon our literature review, we discuss several important research questions surrounding the management and exploitation of visualization data, as well as the role of AI in support of those processes. We make the list of surveyed papers and related material available online at.

Stroke evaluation is critical for coaches to evaluate players' performance in table tennis matches. However, current methods highly demand proficient knowledge in table tennis and are time-consuming. We collaborate with the Chinese national table tennis team and propose Tac-Valuer, an automatic stroke evaluation framework for analysts in table tennis teams. In particular, to integrate analysts' knowledge into the machine learning model, we employ the latest effective framework named abductive learning, showing promising performance. Based on abductive learning, Tac-Valuer combines the state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms to extract and embed stroke features for evaluation. We evaluate the design choices of the approach and present Tac-Valuer's usability through use cases that analyze the performance of the top table tennis players in world-class events.

GIFs are enjoying increasing popularity on social media as a format for data-driven storytelling with visualization; simple visual messages are embedded in short animations that usually last less than 15 seconds and are played in automatic repetition. In this paper, we ask the question, "What makes a data-GIF understandable?" While other storytelling formats such as data videos, infographics, or data comics are relatively well studied, we have little knowledge about the design factors and principles for "data-GIFs". To close this gap, we provide results from semi-structured interviews and an online study with a total of 118 participants investigating the impact of design decisions on the understandability of data-GIFs. The study and our consequent analysis are informed by a systematic review and structured design space of 108 data-GIFs that we found online. Our results show the impact of design dimensions from our design space such as animation encoding, context preservation, or repetition on viewers understanding of the GIF's core message. The paper concludes with a list of suggestions for creating more effective Data-GIFs.

Analyzing students' emotions from classroom videos can help both teachers and parents quickly know the engagement of students in class. The availability of high-definition cameras creates opportunities to record class scenes. However, watching videos is time-consuming, and it is challenging to gain a quick overview of the emotion distribution and find abnormal emotions. In this article, we propose EmotionCues, a visual analytics system to easily analyze classroom videos from the perspective of emotion summary and detailed analysis, which integrates emotion recognition algorithms with visualizations. It consists of three coordinated views: a summary view depicting the overall emotions and their dynamic evolution, a character view presenting the detailed emotion status of an individual, and a video view enhancing the video analysis with further details. Considering the possible inaccuracy of emotion recognition, we also explore several factors affecting the emotion analysis, such as face size and occlusion. They provide hints for inferring the possible inaccuracy and the corresponding reasons. Two use cases and interviews with end users and domain experts are conducted to show that the proposed system could be useful and effective for analyzing emotions in the classroom videos.

The emerging prosperity of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, has come into the spotlight during the past few years. Cryptocurrency exchanges, which act as the gateway to this world, now play a dominant role in the circulation of Bitcoin. Thus, delving into the analysis of the transaction patterns of exchanges can shed light on the evolution and trends in the Bitcoin market, and participants can gain hints for identifying credible exchanges as well. Not only Bitcoin practitioners but also researchers in the financial domains are interested in the business intelligence behind the curtain. However, the task of multiple exchanges exploration and comparisons has been limited owing to the lack of efficient tools. Previous methods of visualizing Bitcoin data have mainly concentrated on tracking suspicious transaction logs, but it is cumbersome to analyze exchanges and their relationships with existing tools and methods. In this paper, we present BitExTract, an interactive visual analytics system, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to explore the evolutionary transaction patterns of Bitcoin exchanges from two perspectives, namely, exchange versus exchange and exchange versus client. In particular, BitExTract summarizes the evolution of the Bitcoin market by observing the transactions between exchanges over time via a massive sequence view. A node-link diagram with ego-centered views depicts the trading network of exchanges and their temporal transaction distribution. Moreover, BitExTract embeds multiple parallel bars on a timeline to examine and compare the evolution patterns of transactions between different exchanges. Three case studies with novel insights demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our system.

The rapid development of information technology paved the way for the recording of fine-grained data, such as stroke techniques and stroke placements, during a table tennis match. This data recording creates opportunities to analyze and evaluate matches from new perspectives. Nevertheless, the increasingly complex data poses a significant challenge to make sense of and gain insights into. Analysts usually employ tedious and cumbersome methods which are limited to watching videos and reading statistical tables. However, existing sports visualization methods cannot be applied to visualizing table tennis competitions due to different competition rules and particular data attributes. In this work, we collaborate with data analysts to understand and characterize the sophisticated domain problem of analysis of table tennis data. We propose iTTVis, a novel interactive table tennis visualization system, which to our knowledge, is the first visual analysis system for analyzing and exploring table tennis data. iTTVis provides a holistic visualization of an entire match from three main perspectives, namely, time-oriented, statistical, and tactical analyses. The proposed system with several well-coordinated views not only supports correlation identification through statistics and pattern detection of tactics with a score timeline but also allows cross analysis to gain insights. Data analysts have obtained several new insights by using iTTVis. The effectiveness and usability of the proposed system are demonstrated with four case studies.