Visual Analytics (VA) is essential for supporting insight generation and knowledge discovery in complex data analysis tasks. However, traditional approaches often overlook the value of user-generated artefacts—such as annotations, parameterizations, selections, spatializations, and other constructs—encapsulating subjective judgments about data and highly contextualized insights. To address this gap, we propose persistent interaction as a paradigm for formalizing how users’ decisions are embedded within artefacts, ensuring their transferability across analytical contexts. In this paper, we introduce a classification of persistent user-generated artefacts, demonstrating their potential through two case studies. We contribute a framework for understanding persistent interaction, insights into artefact generalizability, knowledge transferability, and guidance enhancement, as well as theoretical implications for VA.

Abstract Data size and complexity in Visual Analytics (VA)pose significant challenges for VA systems andVA users. Two recent developments address these challenges: progressive VA (PVA) and guidance for VA (GVA). Both share the goal of supporting the analysis flow. PVA primarily considers the system perspective and incrementally generates partial results during long computations to avoid an unresponsive VA system. GVA is primarily concerned with the user perspective and strives to mitigate knowledge gaps during VA activities to prevent the analysis from stalling. Although PVA and GVA share the same goal, it has not yet been studied how PVA and GVA can join forces to achieve it. Our paper investigates this in detail. We structure our research around two questions: How can guidance enhance PVA and how can progressiveness enhance GVA? This leads to two main themes: Guidance for Progressiveness (G4P) and Progressiveness for Guidance (P4G). By exploring both themes, we arrive at a conceptual model of how progressiveness and guidance can work together. We illustrate the practical value of our theoretical considerations in two case studies ofG4P and P4G.

Enhancing Visual Analytics (VA) systems with guidance, such as the automated provision of data-driven suggestions and answers to the user’s task, is becoming increasingly important and common. However, how to design such systems remains a challenging task. We present a methodology to aid and structure the design of guidance for enhancing VA solutions consisting of four steps: (S1) defining the target of analysis, (S2) identifying the user tasks, (S3) describing the guidance tasks, and (S4) placing guidance. In summary, our proposed methodology specifies a space of possible user tasks and maps them to the corresponding space of guidance tasks, using recent abstract task typologies for guidance and visualization. We exemplify this methodology through two case studies from the literature: Overview , a system for exploring and labeling document collections aimed at journalists, and DoRIAH , a system for historical imagery analysis. We show how our methodology enriches existing VA solutions with guidance and provides a structured way to design guidance in complex VA scenarios.

Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) detection, the identification of remnant active bombs buried underground from archival aerial images, implies a complex workflow involving decision-making at each stage. An essential phase in UXO detection is the task of image selection, where a small subset of images must be chosen from archives to reconstruct an area of interest (AOI) and identify craters. The selected image set must comply with good spatial and temporal coverage over the AOI, particularly in the temporal vicinity of recorded aerial attacks, and do so with minimal images for resource optimization. This paper presents a guidance-enhanced visual analytics prototype to select images for UXO detection. In close collaboration with domain experts, our design process involved analyzing user tasks, eliciting expert knowledge, modeling quality metrics, and choosing appropriate guidance. We report on a user study with two real-world scenarios of image selection performed with and without guidance. Our solution was well-received and deemed highly usable. Through the lens of our task-based design and developed quality measures, we observed guidance-driven changes in user behavior and improved quality of analysis results. An expert evaluation of the study allowed us to improve our guidance-enhanced prototype further and discuss new possibilities for user-adaptive guidance.

Abstract Guidance has been proposed as a conceptual framework to understand how mixed‐initiative visual analytics approaches can actively support users as they solve analytical tasks. While user tasks received a fair share of attention, it is still not completely clear how they could be supported with guidance and how such support could influence the progress of the task itself. Our observation is that there is a research gap in understanding the effect of guidance on the analytical discourse, in particular, for the knowledge generation in mixed‐initiative approaches. As a consequence, guidance in a visual analytics environment is usually indistinguishable from common visualization features, making user responses challenging to predict and measure. To address these issues, we take a system perspective to propose the notion of guidance tasks and we present it as a typology closely aligned to established user task typologies. We derived the proposed typology directly from a model of guidance in the knowledge generation process and illustrate its implications for guidance design. By discussing three case studies, we show how our typology can be applied to analyze existing guidance systems. We argue that without a clear consideration of the system perspective, the analysis of tasks in mixed‐initiative approaches is incomplete. Finally, by analyzing matchings of user and guidance tasks, we describe how guidance tasks could either help the user conclude the analysis or change its course.

Recent availability of data about writing processes at keystroke-granularity has enabled research on the evolution of document writing. A natural task is to develop systems that can actually show this data, that is, user interfaces that transform the data of the process of writing --today a black box-- into intelligible forms. On this line, we propose a data structure that captures a document's fine-grained history and an organic visualization that serves as an interface to it. We evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation of the system through a pilot study using documents written by students at a public university. Our results are promising and reveal facets such as general strategies adopted, local edition density and hierarchical structure of the final text.