We investigate the impact of using anthropomorphized data graphics over standard charts on viewers' empathy for, and prosocial behavior toward suffering populations, in the context of human rights narratives. We present a series of experiments conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, in which we compare various forms of anthropomorphized data graphics-ranging from a single human figure that "fills up" to show proportional data, to separated groups of individual human beings-with a standard chart baseline. Each experiment uses two carefully crafted human rights data-driven stories to present the graphics. Contrary to our expectations, we consistently find that anthropomorphized data graphics and standard charts have very similar effects on empathy and prosocial behavior.

We describe TextTile, a data visualization tool for investigation of datasets and questions that require seamless and flexible analysis of structured data and unstructured text. TextTile is based on real-world data analysis problems gathered through our interaction with a number of domain experts and provides a general purpose solution to such problems. The system integrates a set of operations that can interchangeably be applied to the structured as well as to unstructured text part of the data to generate useful data summaries. Such summaries are then organized in visual tiles in a grid layout to allow their analysis and comparison. We validate TextTile with task analysis, use cases and a user study showing the system can be easily learned and proficiently used to carry out nontrivial tasks.

We present a study aimed at understanding how human observers judge scatter plot similarity when presented with a large set of iconic scatter plot representations. The work we present involves 18 participants with a scientific background in a similarity perception study. The study asks participants to group a carefully selected set of plots according to their subjective perceptual judgement of similarity, and it integrates the results into a consensus similarity grouping. We then use this consensus grouping to generate insights on similarity perception. The main output of this work is a list of concepts we derive to describe major perceptual features, and a description of how these concepts relate and rank. We also evaluate scagnostics (scatter plot diagnostics), a popular and established set of scatter plot descriptors, and show that they do not reliably reproduce our participants judgements. Finally, we discuss the major implications of this study and how these results can be used for future research.

In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of deceptive visualizations. We start with an in-depth analysis of what deception means in the context of data visualization, and categorize deceptive visualizations based on the type of deception they lead to. We identify popular distortion techniques and the type of visualizations those distortions can be applied to, and formalize why deception occurs with those distortions. We create four deceptive visualizations using the selected distortion techniques, and run a crowdsourced user study to identify the deceptiveness of those visualizations. We then present the findings of our study and show how deceptive each of these visual distortion techniques are, and for what kind of questions the misinterpretation occurs. We also analyze individual differences among participants and present the effect of some of those variables on participants' responses. This paper presents a first step in empirically studying deceptive visualizations, and will pave the way for more research in this direction.

Data visualization has been used extensively to inform users. However, little research has been done to examine the effects of data visualization in influencing users or in making a message more persuasive. In this study, we present experimental research to fill this gap and present an evidence-based analysis of persuasive visualization. We built on persuasion research from psychology and user interfaces literature in order to explore the persuasive effects of visualization. In this experimental study we define the circumstances under which data visualization can make a message more persuasive, propose hypotheses, and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses on studies conducted to test these hypotheses. We compare visual treatments with data presented through barcharts and linecharts on the one hand, treatments with data presented through tables on the other, and then evaluate their persuasiveness. The findings represent a first step in exploring the effectiveness of persuasive visualization.

Khan Academy's pre-recorded blackboard-style lecture videos attract millions of online users every month. However, current video navigation tools do not adequately support the kinds of goals that students typically have, like quickly finding a particular concept in a blackboard-style lecture video. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of the new NoteVideo and its improved version, NoteVideo+, systems for identifying the conceptual 'objects' of a blackboard-based video - and then creating a summarized image of the video and using it as an in-scene navigation interface that allows users to directly jump to the video frame where that object first appeared instead of navigating it linearly through time. The research consisted of iteratively implementing the system and then having users perform four different navigation tasks using three different interfaces: Scrubbing, Transcript, and NoteVideo. Results of the study show that participants perform significantly better on all four tasks while using the NoteVideo and its improved version - NoteVideo+ - as compared to others.

Recent advances in human-robot interaction have enhanced the ability of robots to act as a mediator in remote communication. However, embodied expressive communication across distance is not supported by the current technology. Physical body is a powerful conduit for affective communication, and thus mediating properties of the physical body through an agent has been proposed to address this deficiency. In this paper, we offer heuristic justification on vision of embodied interfaces by adopting perspectives from social psychology in the context of mediated interpersonal communication. Based on our studies, we created a pair of robots named “Mini-Surrogate” as a personalized telecommunication medium which recreates and emulates the physical presence of a specific person. It applies the concepts of enclothed and embodied cognition to convey the illusion of a particular person's presence. Through minimal prototyping in terms of surrogate behaviors, we explored desired nonverbal cues by remotely located couples to satisfy their communication needs while being apart. Our exploratory study pointed to the acceptance of prototyped medium and showed that personalization could enhance communication affectivity in terms of providing awareness and reminding of the specific person. We realized the desired nonverbal cues that helped remote couples to perceive the interface as their remote partner. The findings contribute towards user experience, communication and robotic researchers to enhance the quality of telecommunication for remote couples.