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A Transdisciplinary Approach to Problem-Driven Visualizations

Contributors:

Kyle Wm. Hall, Adam J. Bradley, Uta Hinrichs, Samuel Huron, Jo Wood, Christopher Collins and Sheelagh Carpendale

While previous work exists on how to conduct and disseminate insights from problem-driven visualization projects and design studies, the literature does not address how to accomplish these goals in transdisciplinary teams in ways that advance all disciplines involved. In this paper, we introduce and define a new methodological paradigm we call design by immersion, which provides an alternative perspective on problem-driven visualization work. Design by immersion embeds transdisciplinary experiences at the center of the visualization process by having visualization researchers participate in the work of the target domain (or domain experts participate in visualization research). Based on our own combined experiences of working on cross-disciplinary, problem-driven visualization projects, we present six case studies that expose the opportunities that design by immersion enables, including (1) exploring new domain-inspired visualization design spaces, (2) enriching domain understanding through personal experiences, and (3) building strong transdisciplinary relationships. Furthermore, we illustrate how the process of design by immersion opens up a diverse set of design activities that can be combined in different ways depending on the type of collaboration, project, and goals. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential pitfalls of design by immersion.

Publications

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Alberta Innovates Technology Futures (AITF), and SMART Technologies ULC. K. Wm. Hall thanks NSERC for its support through the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships Program.

Lattice Uncertainty Visualization: Understanding Machine Translation

Contributors:

Christopher Collins, Gerald Penn, and Sheelagh Carpendale

Lattice graphs are used as underlying data structures in many statistical processing systems, including natural language processing. Lattices compactly represent multiple possible outputs and are usually hidden from users. We present a novel visualization intended to reveal the uncertainty and variability inherent in statistically-derived outputs of language technologies. Applications such as machine translation and automated speech recognition typically present users with a best guess about the appropriate output, with apparent complete confidence.

Through case studies in cross-lingual instant messaging chat and speech recognition, we show how our visualization uses a hybrid layout along with varying transparency, colour, and size to reveal the various hypotheses considered by the algorithms and help people make better-informed decisions about statistically derived outputs.

Publications

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Acknowledgements