Cambiera: Visual Analytics on the Surface

Researchers

Summary

Group information sharing typically occurs in phases in which individuals drop in and out of phases of joint and parallel work. In collaborative visual analytics, for example, group members need to be able to work on their own sub-projects, in which tentative hypotheses can be created, followed, and rejected. The analysts’ desire for private work is in tension with their desire to capitalize on the group’s shared effort. The group may produce pieces of information that could be useful to the analyst; but the analyst, immersed in his or her work, may not want to be distracted.

In this project, we explored the idea of trading off individual and group work in a context of collaborative visual analytics. We introduced the concept of collaborative brushing and linking as the basis of an implicit visual awareness tool across multiple users.

Cambiera is a system for information foraging activities on a multi-touch tabletop display. Group members can individually search for documents, browse through search results, and read documents. Cambiera includes a number of (collaborative brushing and linking) features that highlight where collaborators have found or read similar documents. The video below shows most of these features and further information can be found in the EuroVis publication.

Evaluation

We also conducted an evaluation on Cambiera. We gave 12 pairs the 2006 VAST contest dataset to work with and explored how they used Cambiera during an analysis session. As a result we describe novel findings in regards to analysis behavior and how it affected which information each individual analyst was considering in regards to the other person. We also describe some measures of success. Our VAST paper and Chapter 7 of my PhD thesis contain more information on the study.

Prizes

  • The system design won the (3rd) best paper award at EuroVis 2009.
  • The evaluation paper won a best paper honorable mention at VAST 2010.

Examples


Each person has their own keyboard on the screen and can start searching for relevant terms in a document collection.

There are a lot of features in the system to help show the group what each person has looked at and found. Watch the video below to see a number of additional ones and read the paper for a complete description.

Video

(:youtube E9izFMJ5yms width=420 height=315 scale=1 fs=1 hd=1 nocookie=1:)
Download the video from the MSR Website

Publications

The system paper:

Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher (2009) Collaborative Brushing and Linking for Co-located Visual Analytics of Document Collections. Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EuroVis), 28(3):1031–1038, June 2009. Received a third best paper award at EuroVis.
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BibTeX entry:


@ARTICLE{Isenberg:2009:CBA, author = {Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher}, title = {C}ollaborative {B}rushing and {L}inking for {C}o-located {V}isual {A}nalytics of {D}ocument {C}ollections, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EuroVis)}, year = {2009}, volume = {28}, number = {3}, month = jun, pages = {1031--1038}, doi = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01444.x}, doi_url = {https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01444.x}, pdf = {../publications/papers/Isenberg_2009_CBL.pdf}, }

The first publication on the user study on collaborative work with the tool:

Petra Isenberg, Danyel Fisher, Ringel Morris,Meredith, Kori Inkpen, and Mary Czerwinski (2010) An Exploratory Study of Co-located Collaborative Visual Analytics around a Tabletop Display. In Proceedings of Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, pages 179–186, 2010. Received a best paper honorable mention..
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BibTeX entry:


@INPROCEEDINGS{Isenberg:2010:DFC, author = {Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher and Ringel Morris,Meredith and Kori Inkpen and Mary Czerwinski}, title = {A}n {E}xploratory {S}tudy of {C}o-located {C}ollaborative {V}isual {A}nalytics around a {T}abletop {D}isplay, booktitle = {Proceedings of Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST)}, year = {2010}, pages = {179--186}, publisher = {IEEE}, address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA}, doi = {10.1109/VAST.2010.5652880}, doi_url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/VAST.2010.5652880}, oa_hal_url = {https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00587236}, pdf = {../publications/papers/Isenberg_2010_AES.pdf}, }

An extended publication with more and corrected data on the user study:

Petra Isenberg, Danyel Fisher, Paul,Sharoda A., Ringel Morris,Meredith, Kori Inkpen, and Mary Czerwinski (2012) Collaborative Visual Analytics Around a Tabletop Display. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 18(5):689–702, May 2012.
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BibTeX entry:


@ARTICLE{Isenberg:2011:CVA2, author = {Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher and Paul,Sharoda A. and Ringel Morris,Meredith and Kori Inkpen and Mary Czerwinski}, title = {C}ollaborative {V}isual {A}nalytics {A}round a {T}abletop {D}isplay, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics}, year = {2012}, volume = {18}, number = {5}, month = may, pages = {689--702}, doi = {10.1109/TVCG.2011.287}, doi_url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2011.287}, pdf = {../publications/papers/Isenberg_2012_CCV.pdf}, }

The video was exhibited in the CSCW video showcase. This is the reference. Video can be viewed above:

Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher (2011) Cambiera: Collaborative Tabletop Visual Analytics. In Videos of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). ACM, New York, pages 581–582, 2011.
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BibTeX entry:


@INPROCEEDINGS{Isenberg:2011:CVA, author = {Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher}, title = {Cambiera: {C}ollaborative {T}abletop {V}isual {A}nalytics}, booktitle = {Videos of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)}, year = {2011}, pages = {581--582}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York}, doi = {10.1145/1958824.1958916}, doi_url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1958824.1958916}, oa_hal_url = {https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00638536}, pdf = {../publications/papers/Isenberg_2011_CVA.pdf}, }

A paper on the visualizations I built while analyzing the data of the user study:

Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher (2011) Pairgrams: Understanding Collaborative Analysis Behavior with Visualization. In CHI Workshop on Analytic Provenance: Process+Interaction+Insight. Held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Vancouver, Canada, 2011.
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BibTeX entry:


@INPROCEEDINGS{Isenberg:2011:PUC, author = {Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher}, title = {P}airgrams: {U}nderstanding {C}ollaborative {A}nalysis {B}ehavior with {V}isualization, booktitle = {CHI Workshop on Analytic Provenance: Process+Interaction+Insight}, year = {2011}, address = {Held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Vancouver, Canada}, pdf = {../publications/papers/Isenberg_2011_PUC.pdf}, }

Links

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