Calliope: Automatic Visual Data Story Generation from a Spreadsheet

Chart2Vec: A Universal Embedding of Context-Aware Visualizations

The advances in AI-enabled techniques have accelerated the creation and automation of visualizations in the past decade. However, presenting visualizations in a descriptive and generative format remains a challenge. Moreover, current visualization embedding methods focus on standalone visualizations, neglecting the importance of contextual information for multi-view visualizations. To address this issue, we propose a new representation model, Chart2Vec, to learn a universal embedding of visualizations with context-aware information. Chart2Vec aims to support a wide range of downstream visualization tasks such as recommendation and storytelling. Our model considers both structural and semantic information of visualizations in declarative specifications. To enhance the context-aware capability, Chart2Vec employs multi-task learning on both supervised and unsupervised tasks concerning the cooccurrence of visualizations. We evaluate our method through an ablation study, a user study, and a quantitative comparison. The results verified the consistency of our embedding method with human cognition and showed its advantages over existing methods.

From Instruction to Insight: Exploring the Functional and Semantic Roles of Text in Interactive Dashboards

There is increased interest in understanding the interplay between text and visuals in the field of data visualization. However, this attention has predominantly been on the use of text in standalone visualizations (such as text annotation overlays) or augmenting text stories supported by a series of independent views. In this paper, we shift from the traditional focus on single-chart annotations to characterize the nuanced but crucial communication role of text in the complex environment of interactive dashboards. Through a survey and analysis of 190 dashboards in the wild, plus 13 expert interview sessions with experienced dashboard authors, we highlight the distinctive nature of text as an integral component of the dashboard experience, while delving into the categories, semantic levels, and functional roles of text, and exploring how these text elements are coalesced by dashboard authors to guide and inform dashboard users. Our contributions are threefold. First, we distill qualitative and quantitative findings from our studies to characterize current practices of text use in dashboards, including a categorization of text-based components and design patterns. Second, we leverage current practices and existing literature to propose, discuss, and validate recommended practices for text in dashboards, embodied as a set of 12 heuristics that underscore the semantic and functional role of text in offering navigational cues, contextualizing data insights, supporting reading order, among other concerns. Third, we reflect on our findings to identify gaps and propose opportunities for data visualization researchers to push the boundaries on text usage for dashboards, from authoring support and interactivity to text generation and content personalization. Our research underscores the significance of elevating text as a first-class citizen in data visualization, and the need to support the inclusion of textual components and their interactive affordances in dashboard design.

SpreadLine: Visualizing Egocentric Dynamic Influence

Egocentric networks, often visualized as node-link diagrams, portray the complex relationship (link) dynamics between an entity (node) and others. However, common analytics tasks are multifaceted, encompassing interactions among four key aspects: strength, function, structure, and content. Current node-link visualization designs may fall short, focusing narrowly on certain aspects and neglecting the holistic, dynamic nature of egocentric networks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpreadLine, a novel visualization framework designed to enable the visual exploration of egocentric networks from these four aspects at the microscopic level. Leveraging the intuitive appeal of storyline visualizations, SpreadLine adopts a storyline-based design to represent entities and their evolving relationships. We further encode essential topological information in the layout and condense the contextual information in a metro map metaphor, allowing for a more engaging and effective way to explore temporal and attribute-based information. To guide our work, with a thorough review of pertinent literature, we have distilled a task taxonomy that addresses the analytical needs specific to egocentric network exploration. Acknowledging the diverse analytical requirements of users, SpreadLine offers customizable encodings to enable users to tailor the framework for their tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy and general applicability of SpreadLine through three diverse real-world case studies (disease surveillance, social media trends, and academic career evolution) and a usability study.

How Does Automation Shape the Process of Narrative Visualization: A Survey of Tools

In recent years, narrative visualization has gained much attention. Researchers have proposed different design spaces for various narrative visualization genres and scenarios to facilitate the creation process. As users' needs grow and automation technologies advance, increasingly more tools have been designed and developed. In this study, we summarized six genres of narrative visualization (annotated charts, infographics, timelines & storylines, data comics, scrollytelling & slideshow, and data videos) based on previous research and four types of tools (design spaces, authoring tools, ML/AI-supported tools and ML/AI-generator tools) based on the intelligence and automation level of the tools. We surveyed 105 papers and tools to study how automation can progressively engage in visualization design and narrative processes to help users easily create narrative visualizations. This research aims to provide an overview of current research and development in the automation involvement of narrative visualization tools. We discuss key research problems in each category and suggest new opportunities to encourage further research in the related domain.

AutoTitle: An Interactive Title Generator for Visualizations

We propose AutoTitle, an interactive visualization title generator satisfying multifarious user requirements. Factors making a good title, namely, the feature importance, coverage, preciseness, general information richness, conciseness, and non-technicality, are summarized based on the feedback from user interviews. Visualization authors need to trade off among these factors to fit specific scenarios, resulting in a wide design space of visualization titles. AutoTitle generates various titles through the process of visualization facts traversing, deep learning-based fact-to-title generation, and quantitative evaluation of the six factors. AutoTitle also provides users with an interactive interface to explore the desired titles by filtering the metrics. We conduct a user study to validate the quality of generated titles as well as the rationality and helpfulness of these metrics.

More Than Data Stories: Broadening the Role of Visualization in Contemporary Journalism

Data visualization and journalism are deeply connected. From early infographics to recent data-driven storytelling, visualization has become an integrated part of contemporary journalism, primarily as a communication artifact to inform the general public. Data journalism, harnessing the power of data visualization, has emerged as a bridge between the growing volume of data and our society. Visualization research that centers around data storytelling has sought to understand and facilitate such journalistic endeavors. However, a recent metamorphosis in journalism has brought broader challenges and opportunities that extend beyond mere communication of data. We present this article to enhance our understanding of such transformations and thus broaden visualization research's scope and practical contribution to this evolving field. We first survey recent significant shifts, emerging challenges, and computational practices in journalism. We then summarize six roles of computing in journalism and their implications. Based on these implications, we provide propositions for visualization research concerning each role. Ultimately, by mapping the roles and propositions onto a proposed ecological model and contextualizing existing visualization research, we surface seven general topics and a series of research agendas that can guide future visualization research at this intersection.

ChartStory: Automated Partitioning, Layout, and Captioning of Charts into Comic-Style Narratives

Visual data storytelling is gaining importance as a means of presenting data-driven information or analysis results, especially to the general public. This has resulted in design principles being proposed for data-driven storytelling, and new authoring tools being created to aid such storytelling. However, data analysts typically lack sufficient background in design and storytelling to make effective use of these principles and authoring tools. To assist this process, we present ChartStory for crafting data stories from a collection of user-created charts, using a style akin to comic panels to imply the underlying sequence and logic of data-driven narratives. Our approach is to operationalize established design principles into an advanced pipeline that characterizes charts by their properties and similarities to each other, and recommends ways to partition, layout, and caption story pieces to serve a narrative. ChartStory also augments this pipeline with intuitive user interactions for visual refinement of generated data comics. We extensively and holistically evaluate ChartStory via a trio of studies. We first assess how the tool supports data comic creation in comparison to a manual baseline tool. Data comics from this study are subsequently compared and evaluated to ChartStory's automated recommendations by a team of narrative visualization practitioners. This is followed by a pair of interview studies with data scientists using their own datasets and charts who provide an additional assessment of the system. We find that ChartStory provides cogent recommendations for narrative generation, resulting in data comics that compare favorably to manually-created ones.

The Influence of Visual Provenance Representations on Strategies in a Collaborative Hand-off Data Analysis Scenario

Conducting data analysis tasks rarely occur in isolation. Especially in intelligence analysis scenarios where different experts contribute knowledge to a shared understanding, members must communicate how insights develop to establish common ground among collaborators. The use of provenance to communicate analytic sensemaking carries promise by describing the interactions and summarizing the steps taken to reach insights. Yet, no universal guidelines exist for communicating provenance in different settings. Our work focuses on the presentation of provenance information and the resulting conclusions reached and strategies used by new analysts. In an open-ended, 30-minute, textual exploration scenario, we qualitatively compare how adding different types of provenance information (specifically data coverage and interaction history) affects analysts' confidence in conclusions developed, propensity to repeat work, filtering of data, identification of relevant information, and typical investigation strategies. We see that data coverage (i.e., what was interacted with) provides provenance information without limiting individual investigation freedom. On the other hand, while interaction history (i.e., when something was interacted with) does not significantly encourage more mimicry, it does take more time to comfortably understand, as represented by less confident conclusions and less relevant information-gathering behaviors. Our results contribute empirical data towards understanding how provenance summarizations can influence analysis behaviors.

DashBot: Insight-Driven Dashboard Generation Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Analytical dashboards are popular in business intelligence to facilitate insight discovery with multiple charts. However, creating an effective dashboard is highly demanding, which requires users to have adequate data analysis background and be familiar with professional tools, such as Power BI. To create a dashboard, users have to configure charts by selecting data columns and exploring different chart combinations to optimize the communication of insights, which is trial-and-error. Recent research has started to use deep learning methods for dashboard generation to lower the burden of visualization creation. However, such efforts are greatly hindered by the lack of large-scale and high-quality datasets of dashboards. In this work, we propose using deep reinforcement learning to generate analytical dashboards that can use well-established visualization knowledge and the estimation capacity of reinforcement learning. Specifically, we use visualization knowledge to construct a training environment and rewards for agents to explore and imitate human exploration behavior with a well-designed agent network. The usefulness of the deep reinforcement learning model is demonstrated through ablation studies and user studies. In conclusion, our work opens up new opportunities to develop effective ML-based visualization recommenders without beforehand training datasets.

Supporting Expressive and Faithful Pictorial Visualization Design with Visual Style Transfer

Pictorial visualizations portray data with figurative messages and approximate the audience to the visualization. Previous research on pictorial visualizations has developed authoring tools or generation systems, but their methods are restricted to specific visualization types and templates. Instead, we propose to augment pictorial visualization authoring with visual style transfer, enabling a more extensible approach to visualization design. To explore this, our work presents Vistylist, a design support tool that disentangles the visual style of a source pictorial visualization from its content and transfers the visual style to one or more intended pictorial visualizations. We evaluated Vistylist through a survey of example pictorial visualizations, a controlled user study, and a series of expert interviews. The results of our evaluation indicated that Vistylist is useful for creating expressive and faithful pictorial visualizations.

Erato: Cooperative Data Story Editing via Fact Interpolation

As an effective form of narrative visualization, visual data stories are widely used in data-driven storytelling to communicate complex insights and support data understanding. Although important, they are difficult to create, as a variety of interdisciplinary skills, such as data analysis and design, are required. In this work, we introduce Erato, a human-machine cooperative data story editing system, which allows users to generate insightful and fluent data stories together with the computer. Specifically, Erato only requires a number of keyframes provided by the user to briefly describe the topic and structure of a data story. Meanwhile, our system leverages a novel interpolation algorithm to help users insert intermediate frames between the keyframes to smooth the transition. We evaluated the effectiveness and usefulness of the Erato system via a series of evaluations including a Turing test, a controlled user study, a performance validation, and interviews with three expert users. The evaluation results showed that the proposed interpolation technique was able to generate coherent story content and help users create data stories more efficiently.

AI4VIS: Survey on Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Data Visualization

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.

Propagating Visual Designs to Numerous Plots and Dashboards

In the process of developing an infrastructure for providing visualization and visual analytics (VIS) tools to epidemiologists and modeling scientists, we encountered a technical challenge for applying a number of visual designs to numerous datasets rapidly and reliably with limited development resources. In this paper, we present a technical solution to address this challenge. Operationally, we separate the tasks of data management, visual designs, and plots and dashboard deployment in order to streamline the development workflow. Technically, we utilize: an ontology to bring datasets, visual designs, and deployable plots and dashboards under the same management framework; multi-criteria search and ranking algorithms for discovering potential datasets that match a visual design; and a purposely-design user interface for propagating each visual design to appropriate datasets (often in tens and hundreds) and quality-assuring the propagation before the deployment. This technical solution has been used in the development of the RAMPVIS infrastructure for supporting a consortium of epidemiologists and modeling scientists through visualization.

Visual Analysis of Hyperproperties for Understanding Model Checking Results

Model checkers provide algorithms for proving that a mathematical model of a system satisfies a given specification. In case of a violation, a counterexample that shows the erroneous behavior is returned. Understanding these counterexamples is challenging, especially for hyperproperty specifications, i.e., specifications that relate multiple executions of a system to each other. We aim to facilitate the visual analysis of such counterexamples through our HyperVis tool, which provides interactive visualizations of the given model, specification, and counterexample. Within an iterative and interdisciplinary design process, we developed visualization solutions that can effectively communicate the core aspects of the model checking result. Specifically, we introduce graphical representations of binary values for improving pattern recognition, color encoding for better indicating related aspects, visually enhanced textual descriptions, as well as extensive cross-view highlighting mechanisms. Further, through an underlying causal analysis of the counterexample, we are also able to identify values that contributed to the violation and use this knowledge for both improved encoding and highlighting. Finally, the analyst can modify both the specification of the hyperproperty and the system directly within HyperVis and initiate the model checking of the new version. In combination, these features notably support the analyst in understanding the error leading to the counterexample as well as iterating the provided system and specification. We ran multiple case studies with HyperVis and tested it with domain experts in qualitative feedback sessions. The participants' positive feedback confirms the considerable improvement over the manual, text-based status quo and the value of the tool for explaining hyperproperties.

GlyphCreator: Towards Example-based Automatic Generation of Circular Glyphs

Circular glyphs are used across disparate fields to represent multidimensional data. However, although these glyphs are extremely effective, creating them is often laborious, even for those with professional design skills. This paper presents GlyphCreator, an interactive tool for the example-based generation of circular glyphs. Given an example circular glyph and multidimensional input data, GlyphCreator promptly generates a list of design candidates, any of which can be edited to satisfy the requirements of a particular representation. To develop GlyphCreator, we first derive a design space of circular glyphs by summarizing relationships between different visual elements. With this design space, we build a circular glyph dataset and develop a deep learning model for glyph parsing. The model can deconstruct a circular glyph bitmap into a series of visual elements. Next, we introduce an interface that helps users bind the input data attributes to visual elements and customize visual styles. We evaluate the parsing model through a quantitative experiment, demonstrate the use of GlyphCreator through two use scenarios, and validate its effectiveness through user interviews.

A Mixed-Initiative Approach to Reusing Infographic Charts

Infographic bar charts have been widely adopted for communicating numerical information because of their attractiveness and memorability. However, these infographics are often created manually with general tools, such as PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator, and merely composed of primitive visual elements, such as text blocks and shapes. With the absence of chart models, updating or reusing these infographics requires tedious and error-prone manual edits. In this paper, we propose a mixed-initiative approach to mitigate this pain point. On one hand, machines are adopted to perform precise and trivial operations, such as mapping numerical values to shape attributes and aligning shapes. On the other hand, we rely on humans to perform subjective and creative tasks, such as changing embellishments or approving the edits made by machines. We encapsulate our technique in a PowerPoint add-in prototype and demonstrate the effectiveness by applying our technique on a diverse set of infographic bar chart examples.

Kineticharts: Augmenting Affective Expressiveness of Charts in Data Stories with Animation Design

Data stories often seek to elicit affective feelings from viewers. However, how to design affective data stories remains under-explored. In this work, we investigate one specific design factor, animation, and present Kineticharts, an animation design scheme for creating charts that express five positive affects: joy, amusement, surprise, tenderness, and excitement. These five affects were found to be frequently communicated through animation in data stories. Regarding each affect, we designed varied kinetic motions represented by bar charts, line charts, and pie charts, resulting in 60 animated charts for the five affects. We designed Kineticharts by first conducting a need-finding study with professional practitioners from data journalism and then analyzing a corpus of affective motion graphics to identify salient kinetic patterns. We evaluated Kineticharts through two user studies. The results suggest that Kineticharts can accurately convey affects, and improve the expressiveness of data stories, as well as enhance user engagement without hindering data comprehension compared to the animation design from DataClips, an authoring tool for data videos.

Augmenting Sports Videos with VisCommentator

Visualizing data in sports videos is gaining traction in sports analytics, given its ability to communicate insights and explicate player strategies engagingly. However, augmenting sports videos with such data visualizations is challenging, especially for sports analysts, as it requires considerable expertise in video editing. To ease the creation process, we present a design space that characterizes augmented sports videos at an element-level (what the constituents are) and clip-level (how those constituents are organized). We do so by systematically reviewing 233 examples of augmented sports videos collected from TV channels, teams, and leagues. The design space guides selection of data insights and visualizations for various purposes. Informed by the design space and close collaboration with domain experts, we design VisCommentator, a fast prototyping tool, to eases the creation of augmented table tennis videos by leveraging machine learning-based data extractors and design space-based visualization recommendations. With VisCommentator, sports analysts can create an augmented video by selecting the data to visualize instead of manually drawing the graphical marks. Our system can be generalized to other racket sports (e.g., tennis, badminton) once the underlying datasets and models are available. A user study with seven domain experts shows high satisfaction with our system, confirms that the participants can reproduce augmented sports videos in a short period, and provides insightful implications into future improvements and opportunities.

A Design Space for Applying the Freytag's Pyramid Structure to Data Stories

Data stories integrate compelling visual content to communicate data insights in the form of narratives. The narrative structure of a data story serves as the backbone that determines its expressiveness, and it can largely influence how audiences perceive the insights. Freytag's Pyramid is a classic narrative structure that has been widely used in film and literature. While there are continuous recommendations and discussions about applying Freytag's Pyramid to data stories, little systematic and practical guidance is available on how to use Freytag's Pyramid for creating structured data stories. To bridge this gap, we examined how existing practices apply Freytag's Pyramid by analyzing stories extracted from 103 data videos. Based on our findings, we proposed a design space of narrative patterns, data flows, and visual communications to provide practical guidance on achieving narrative intents, organizing data facts, and selecting visual design techniques through story creation. We evaluated the proposed design space through a workshop with 25 participants. Results show that our design space provides a clear framework for rapid storyboarding of data stories with Freytag's Pyramid.

Smile or Scowl? Looking at Infographic Design Through the Affective Lens

Infographics are frequently promoted for their ability to communicate data to audiences affectively. To facilitate the creation of affect-stirring infographics, it is important to characterize and understand people's affective responses to infographics and derive practical design guidelines for designers. To address these research questions, we first conducted two crowdsourcing studies to identify 12 infographic-associated affective responses and collect user feedback explaining what triggered affective responses in infographics. Then, by coding the user feedback, we present a taxonomy of design heuristics that exemplifies the affect-related design factors in infographics. We evaluated the design heuristics with 15 designers. The results showed that our work supports assessing the affective design in infographics and facilitates the ideation and creation of affective infographics.