We present the first dataset, an annotation scheme, discourse analysis, and baseline experiments on argumentation and domain content types in scholarly articles on political science, specifically on the theory of International Relations (IR). The dataset comprises over 1 600 sentences stemming from three foundational articles on Neo-Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. We show that our annotation scheme enables educationally-relevant insight into the scholarly IR discourse and that state-of-the-art classifiers, while effective in distinguishing basic argumentative elements (Claims and Support/Attack relations) reaching up to 0.97 micro F1 , require domain-specific training and fine-tuning on the more fine-grained tasks of relation and content type prediction.

The lack of visually guided data exploration tools limits the scope of research questions communication scientists are able to study. The Comment Analyzer steps in where traditional statistical tools fail when it comes to researching the commenting behavior of news article readers. The basis of such an analysis are comment-thread corpora in which comments are tagged with various deliberative quality indicators as well as political stance. Our analysis tool provides a visual querying system for the exploration and analysis of such corpora and allows social scientists to gain insights into the distributions and relations between comment attributes, the homogeneity of thread sets, frequent thread structures and changes in comment qualities over the course of a single but in particular of multiple threads at once. We developed the tool in close collaboration with communication scientists in a user-centered approach. The system has proven its utility in thorough reviews with the communication scientists, by corroborating existing findings in the literature but particularly by provoking and answering new research questions. Final reviews with five independent experts confirmed these observations and revealed the potential of the Comment Analyzer for other datasets currently being created and analyzed in the communication sciences.

Abstract This paper presents new techniques for seamlessly transitioning between parallel coordinate plots, star plots, and scatter plots. The star plot serves as a mediator visualization between parallel coordinate plots and scatter plots since it uses lines to represent data items as parallel coordinates do and can arrange axes orthogonally as used for scatter plots. The design of the transitions also motivated a new variant of the star plot, the polycurve star plot, that uses curved lines instead of straight ones and has advantages both in terms of space utilization and the detection of clusters. Furthermore, we developed a geometrically motivated method to embed scatter points from a scatter plot into star plots and parallel coordinate plots to track the transition of structural information such as clusters and correlations between the different plot types. The integration of our techniques into an interactive analysis tool for exploring multivariate data demonstrates the advantages and utility of our approach over a multi‐view approach for scatter plots and parallel coordinate plots, which we confirmed in a user study and concrete usage scenarios.

This paper presents a visual analytics system for exploring, analyzing and comparing argument structures in essay corpora. We provide an overview of the corpus by a list of ArguLines which represent the argument units of each essay by a sequence of glyphs. Each glyph encodes the stance, the depth and the relative position of an argument unit. The overview can be ordered in various ways to reveal patterns and outliers. Subsets of essays can be selected and analyzed in detail using the Argument Unit Occurrence Tree which aggregates the argument structures using hierarchical histograms. This hierarchical view facilitates the estimation of statistics and trends concerning the progression of the argumentation in the essays. It also provides insights into the commonalities and differences between selected subsets. The text view is the necessary textual basis to verify conclusions from the other views and the annotation process. Linking the views and interaction techniques for visual filtering, studying the evolution of stance within a subset of essays and scrutinizing the order of argumentative units enable a deep analysis of essay corpora. Our expert reviews confirmed the utility of the system and revealed detailed and previously unknown information about the argumentation in our sample corpus.

Abstract This paper presents a short‐contact multitouch vocabulary for interacting with scatterplot matrices (SPLOMs) on wall‐sized displays. Fling‐based gestures overcome central interaction challenges of such large displays by avoiding long swipes on the typically blunt surfaces, frequent physical navigation by walking for accessing screen areas beyond arm's reach in the horizontal direction and uncomfortable postures for accessing screen areas in the vertical direction. Furthermore, we make use of the display's high resolution and large size by supporting the efficient specification of two‐tiered focus + context regions which are consistently propagated across the SPLOM. These techniques are complemented by axis‐centered and lasso‐based selection techniques for specifying subsets of the data. An expert review as well as a user study confirmed the potential and general usability of our seamlessly integrated multitouch interaction techniques for SPLOMs on large vertical displays.

This paper presents a multitouch vocabulary for interacting with parallel coordinates plots on wall-sized displays. The gesture set relies on principles such as two-finger range definition, a functional distinction of background and foreground for applying the Hold-and-Move concept to wall-sized displays as well as fling-based interaction for triggering and controlling long-range movements. Our implementation demonstrates that out-of-reach problems and limitations regarding multitouch technology and display size can be tackled by the coherent integration of our multitouch gestures. Expert reviews indicate that our gesture vocabulary helps to solve typical analysis tasks that require interaction beyond arms' reach, and it also shows how often certain gestures were used.

This paper presents a visualization framework that aids readers in understanding and analyzing the contents of medium-sized text collections that are typical for the opus of a single or few authors. We contribute several document-based visualization techniques to facilitate the exploration of the work of the German author Bazon Brock by depicting various aspects of its texts, such as the TextGenetics that shows the structure of the collection along with its chronology. The ConceptCircuit augments the TextGenetics with entities - persons and locations that were crucial to his work. All visualizations are sensitive to a wildcard-based phrase search that allows complex requests towards the author's work. Further development, as well as expert reviews and discussions with the author Bazon Brock, focused on the assessment and comparison of visualizations based on automatic topic extraction against ones that are based on expert knowledge.

Abstract We present a natural extension of two‐dimensional parallel‐coordinates plots for revealing relationships in time‐dependent multi‐attribute data by building on the idea that time can be considered as the third dimension. A time slice through the visualization represents a certain point in time and can be viewed as a regular parallel‐coordinates display. A vertical slice through one of the axes of the parallel‐coordinates display would show a time‐series plot. For a focus‐and‐context Integration of both views, we embed time‐series plots between two adjacent axes of the parallel‐coordinates plot. Both time‐series plots are drawn using a pseudo three‐dimensional perspective with a single vanishing point. An independent parallel‐coordinates panel that connects the two perspectively displayed time‐series plots can move forward and backward in time to reveal changes in the relationship between the time‐dependent attributes. The visualization of time‐series plots in the context of the parallel‐coordinates plot facilitates the exploration of time‐related aspects of the data without the need to switch to a separate display. We provide a consistent set of tools for selecting and contrasting subsets of the data, which are important for various application domains.

Abstract We developed a visual analysis tool to support the verification, assessment, and presentation of alleged cases of plagiarism. The analysis of a suspicious document typically results in a compilation of categorized “finding spots”. The categorization reveals the way in which the suspicious text fragment was created from the source, e.g. by obfuscation, translation, or by shake and paste. We provide a three‐level approach for exploring the finding spots in context. The overview shows the relationship of the entire suspicious document to the set of source documents. A glyph‐based view reveals the structural and textual differences and similarities of a set of finding spots and their corresponding source text fragments. For further analysis and editing of the finding spot's assessment, the actual text fragments can be embedded side‐by‐side in the diffline view. The different views are tied together by versatile navigation and selection operations. Our expert reviewers confirm that our tool provides a significant improvement over existing static visualizations for assessing plagiarism cases.

We present a system for visualizing food ingredients with a glyph-based approach aimed at children between the ages of four and eight, approximately. The intention is to visually explain and to visually argue that a certain food a child is eager to eat is healthy or, more often, is not healthy. Therefore, we introduced two comic-like characters whose shape and features depend on the main ingredients of food products. These characters can be directly displayed on a parent's smartphone by scanning the barcode of a food product. Our study showed that children are able to recognize several ingredient manifestations encoded as visual attributes and thus to consider a food product as being healthy or not.

We present the Product Explorer, an interactive parallel coordinates display for facilitating the selection process of typical products offered in online shops. Users can quickly narrow down the product search to a small subset or even a single product by using our visual query interface. Our study confirms that our interactive Product Explorer is a fast and easy-to-use tool for the product selection process of casual users.

The WORDGRAPH helps writers in visually choosing phrases while writing a text. It checks for the commonness of phrases and allows for the retrieval of alternatives by means of wildcard queries. To support such queries, we implement a scalable retrieval engine, which returns high-quality results within milliseconds using a probabilistic retrieval strategy. The results are displayed as WORDGRAPH visualization or as a textual list. The graphical interface provides an effective means for interactive exploration of search results using filter techniques, query expansion, and navigation. Our observations indicate that, of three investigated retrieval tasks, the textual interface is sufficient for the phrase verification task, wherein both interfaces support context-sensitive word choice, and the WORDGRAPH best supports the exploration of a phrase's context or the underlying corpus. Our user study confirms these observations and shows that WORDGRAPH is generally the preferred interface over the textual result list for queries containing multiple wildcards.

NETSPEAK helps writers in choosing words while writing a text. It checks for the commonness of phrases and allows for the retrieval of alternatives by means of wildcard queries. To support such queries, we implement a scalable retrieval engine, which returns high-quality results within milliseconds using a probabilistic retrieval strategy. The results are displayed as WORDGRAPH visualization or as a textual list. The graphical interface provides an effective means for interactive exploration of search results using filter techniques, query expansion and navigation. Our observations indicate that, of three investigated retrieval tasks, the textual interface is sufficient for the phrase verification task, wherein both views support context-sensitive word choice, and the WORDGRAPH best supports the exploration of a phrase's context or the underlying corpus. The preferred view for context-sensitive word choice seems to depend on query complexity (i.e. the number of wildcards in a query).